B006JHRY9S EBOK (14 page)

Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all.

—The Town

They both were desperate as 1918 arrived and the likelihood of Estelle’s marriage with Cornell Franklin loomed unavoidable. Neither wanted it to happen, but it seemed to approach with a logic and momentum they could not counter. To the outward eye, Franklin was as appealing a candidate for marriage as Faulkner was not. Handsome, ambitious, the son of an established Southern family, he had graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1913, covered with honors. President of his class, captain of the track team, he was the most notable of the suitors the precocious Estelle attracted. He took her to the glamorous college parties she was otherwise too young to attend, and he may have spoken of a future they might share. Since older boys had been buzzing around her and saying similar things for years now, she knew that such chatter went with the pleasures of the chase. It augured little. When her parents sent her off to Mary Baldwin College that same year—to get a proper “finishing” to her education—she hardly thought of Franklin as a future husband. Her bond with Faulkner was deeper—something she unthinkingly drew on as a talisman that would protect her from the consequences of her own flirtations. For his part, Franklin hardly knew that Faulkner existed. Finishing law school at the university in 1914, Franklin headed to Honolulu, where family connections had secured him the post of collector of the port. His career was all before him and already on the rise. He knew that when the time came, Estelle would be the right partner to share it with him.

Mary Baldwin had been at best a mixed blessing—too Presbyterian and restrictive to accommodate Estelle’s energies. Within a year, she was back in
Oxford, enrolled as a special student at the university, continuing to attract suitors. Yet she never ceased to wear Faulkner’s gold ring. She must have believed that—somehow—the intimacy they had shared over the years would serve as a keel to take her through whatever turbulence lay ahead. Franklin, meanwhile, had prospered as anticipated. By December 1917, he had become assistant district attorney in Honolulu, with the prospect of a federal judgeship. Three years had passed; it was time for the next step. He instructed his mother to send Estelle a double diamond ring, and he wrote her to say that it meant their engagement. He was returning to Oxford in April, so that they could marry.

She was both unsurprised and dumbfounded. Her friends and family had been expecting nothing less; they congratulated her on the catch of the year. Franklin’s mother, a close friend of her own mother, shared her delight with the Oldhams. Elaborate wedding plans were set in motion. Only Estelle resisted, in a silent way that indicated a desire to escape but no plan for doing so. Rather than openly rebel, she appeared at social functions without Franklin’s impressive ring on her finger. When her mother pushed for an explanation, she allowed that the ring had been lost. Intensive searching discovered it at the bottom of one of her dresser drawers. She was caught in a trap—one she could not free herself from, since it took the shape of her own social identity. Franklin was approaching with an offer of marriage because she had always encouraged his pursuit.

Desperate, she turned to Faulkner for a way out, but he felt as hemmed in as she did. It had taken him, also, a lifetime of becoming who he was to find himself in this trap. The trap of who he was: a brooding poet yet to publish poems, a young man without a high school diploma, a frustrated cashier in his grandfather’s bank, someone easily identified as one of the town’s aimless and heavy-drinking youths; in short, a bad bet. He had no prospects, no counter-argument to propose. What he wanted most not to happen was getting ready to happen—not despite who they were, but because of who they were. She could not bear it. “I suppose I
am
engaged to Cornell now,” she told him, “but I’m ready to elope with you.” “No,” he answered, “we’ll have to get your father’s consent” (F 54).

Was he determined, like Sutpen in
Absalom
, to have the big wedding or no union at all? Was he paralyzed by his own contradictoriness—the solitary genius on the one hand, the son and citizen and family man on the other? Could he have realized that his answer, by guaranteeing her marriage to Franklin, would wreck his life? That a moment’s eight-word utterance could have a lifetime’s consequences? He was not ready for this
crisis. Did he glimpse that this is what a crisis is—what you are not ready for? Almost thirty years later, one of his narrators would brood: “Because the tragedy of life is, it must be premature, inconclusive and inconcludable, in order to be life; it must be before itself, in advance of itself, to have been at all” (TN 279). There is something awry about our insertion in time itself. We get hold of our experience only in its wake. Untimely: the events that define us are in advance of themselves. They register now as violence; they get their definition only later. Too late, we see that we have been—defined. It would take him another ten years to understand how fatally he had been defined by saying no to her proposal to elope. This awful life-moment did not reveal its portent when it occurred. It would take “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” for him to realize what was at stake today, in a moment’s utterance.
¹

Her parents of course refused their consent; so did his. No one else was about to authorize his union with Estelle. In the quick of the moment, he did not find it possible to do so on his own. Defeated, they bowed before the separation seemingly decreed on them. She withdrew into a silent grief, even as she entered the circle of nuptial activities: the bridge and breakfast and bridal parties before the big event. The night before the wedding, staying with her great-aunt, she wept for hours, inconsolable. “I’m going to go to your father and make him call this wedding off,” her alarmed great-aunt declared. “No, you mustn’t do that,” she responded: “Daddy will be furious. It’s too late” (F2 1:204). “Its not even time until it was,” Quentin muses in
The Sound and the Fury
. By the time you firm up your sense of what you must not do, you are already immersed in its doing. It was too late. She would marry Cornell Franklin. On that fateful April 18, 1918, Faulkner’s brother Johncy served as the chauffeur who drove them to the church.

As for Faulkner, unable to shape his fate in the moment called for, he relapsed into the care of others, something he would do often in the years ahead. Weeks before the wedding—once he was sure nothing could prevent it—he had accepted Phil Stone’s offer of lodgings in New Haven, as well as Stone’s plan to negotiate their entry into the war before it ended. The war: nothing less than that would have the weight and substance to free him from the pain of his love loss. Much later, in
Absalom
, Faulkner would have Mr. Compson articulate the same spurious hope that “the War would settle the matter … since it would not be the first time that youth has taken catastrophe as a direct act of Providence for the sole purpose of solving a personal problem which youth itself could not solve” (AA 99). But Phil Stone could—if anyone could—arrange a way out.

Stone had been arranging ways out for the past four years. Ever since Stone’s return to Oxford in 1914, Yale degree in hand to match the Mississippi one obtained earlier, he had found in Faulkner a focus for his own energies and ambitions. Stone was the sort of man who needed someone else for this release. “I’m like an elaborate intricate piece of machinery which doesn’t quite work,” he once described himself.”
²
In Faulkner he recognized a different kind of machinery—one that might work. Lending the budding teen-aged poet book after book from his own library, introducing him to both the classics in English literature and the latest in modern poetry, Stone provided Faulkner with the education he failed to get either in high school or (as a special student) in college. “Provided” is too gentle a term: “To say that Phil ‘encouraged’ Bill, as so many biographers do,” recalled a university acquaintance later, “is gross understatement. He cajoled, browbeat, and swore at him; he threatened and pleaded. Encouragement came later.”
³

Stone seemed connected to everyone. It was Stone who introduced Faulkner to elegant Stark Young (Mississippi’s early twentieth-century claim to literary fame). This introduction led, in 1921, to Faulkner meeting Young’s friend Elizabeth Prall in New York. She in turn would procure for the impecunious Faulkner a clerk job at Lord and Taylor’s bookstore that fall. Later, in 1924, she would marry Sherwood Anderson and move to New Orleans with him. There Faulkner would renew his acquaintance, and through her he would become, in 1925, a friend of Anderson as well. Stone’s circle of acquaintances hardly stopped there. He was familiar with underworld communities as well as those above ground—gambling clubs, brothels and speakeasies, suppliers of bootleg liquor—in Clarksdale, Memphis, and New Orleans. These, too, he generously introduced Faulkner to, furnishing materials of character and plot that Faulkner would draw on exhaustively in the fiction to come. All told, the unstinting Stone made available to Faulkner books to read, ideas to probe, money to finance
The Marble Faun
, and keys to both illicit underworlds and respectable centers of culture. Most deeply perhaps, Stone furnished, this time unawares, the resonant image of his own complex failure. A talented and sensitive son of the planterly Old South, Stone was unable to deal with the New South’s rising tide of rednecks—the Vardamans and Bilbos who were coming to power. He revealed in himself more than himself. Looked at aright, he radiated the larger plight of Faulkner’s once-aristocratic Compsons and Sartorises, as they struggled against the multipronged invasion of carpetbagger and white trash Snopeses.

Stone would make all of this available to Faulkner over time. Right now, in the spring of 1918, he promised to secure a way into the war. He had
his reasons for wanting to lead Faulkner in that direction. He, too, was disappointed in love; the two young men had for some time made common cause as spurned lovers. Did their bond go further than that? Do the often overwrought and quasi-erotic relations between young men in Faulkner’s novels owe something to an ambiguous intimacy between mentor and pupil? It seems clear that Stone was not only Faulkner’s closest friend during Faulkner’s late teens but also a guide who saw Estelle as a dangerous competitor. She could lead his budding genius astray. Stone had already done what he could to dampen Faulkner’s ardor; talk of elopement only made him more apprehensive. Then, shortly before Estelle’s marriage, Stone learned that Faulkner had secretly tried to enlist with the air division of the U.S. army. Stuffing himself with bananas and drinking as much water as he could swallow, Faulkner had presented himself at the recruiting station—and been rejected: too short (five feet five and a half inches) and too light (125 pounds). Startled by this reckless attempt, and alarmed that his prodigy might reconsider the elopement option, Stone went into action. He telephoned Maud Falkner from New Haven and told her of her son’s attempt to enlist. He then urged her to support his move to get Faulkner up to New Haven instead. There, under his guidance, the two of them would find the right way to join the war. Maud must have assented, for Faulkner boarded the train in Oxford at the end of March, bound for New Haven and a world elsewhere.

Faulkner was already modestly known as a player of roles. His expensive, tight-fitting Memphis clothes had earned him the sobriquet “the Count.” More, his storytelling and poetic activities made him widely recognizable as “literary.” In addition, he enjoyed already a reputation for undue silence and undue drinking. Such role-playing is as naught, however, when compared to the array of performances that began with his boarding that train to New Haven. Staying in Stone’s rooms, he began in earnest to plot his masquerade. The two of them decided that their most likely entry into the war would be Canadian, not American—by way of the Canadian RAF. To accomplish this, they reasoned, it would be necessary to pass themselves off as British. To that end, they enlisted one of Stone’s British friends at Yale to tutor them in British pronunciations. According to Stone, they then determined that an English accent might not suffice to persuade the Canadian recruiters: they might need “documents” to prove their British provenance.
So they prevailed on a Yale student’s friend in London to mail back to them a British-stamped letter of reference—signed by an invented vicar named “Reverend Mr. Edward Twimberly-Thorndike.” Their reverend stoutly testified to their standing as “god-fearing young Christian gentlemen” (F2 1:206-7). Evidently, it worked—if it was needed at all, since Canadian RAF recruiters in New York were not all that picky in 1918 about accepting volunteers. Stone never pursued the plan any further, but Faulkner got himself accepted into a Canadian RAF program in Toronto. On July 19, he began training to become a fighter pilot.

The letters he wrote home from Canada, during the last five months of 1918, are revealing. He tells his mother: “A young fellow named Bushell whom I knew very well” suddenly died in a football game “and was given a military funeral, the same as an officer would have been. It was very unusual for a private soldier to get” (TH 125). No reflections about the sudden death of Bushell (“whom I knew very well”) but emphatic attention to the status accorded to the funeral. Faulkner seems to have been desperate to gain such status himself. A vignette one of his biographers heard from another cadet in Faulkner’s camp speaks to this desire: “On one occasion, when Faulkner received a check from home, he bought drinks for his four roommates and wound up conducting a one-man drill on the sidewalk, calling out commands loudly and then executing them smartly” (F 62-3). His role-playing is patently on display in this piece of psychodrama. As though entranced, Faulkner performed both the giving and receiving of commands, himself a one-man theater of war.