B006JHRY9S EBOK (16 page)

Off-balance, uncertain—“they had stopped the war on him”—the range of roles he affected during the immediate postwar years implied Parnassus more than Oxford. With Phil Stone he continued his sorties—to Clarks-dale, Memphis, and New Orleans—to engage in gambling, bootleg drinking, and other activities unavailable in Oxford. At Stone’s instigation, he also actively submitted for publication the poems he was writing. Once he got a lucky break. The
New Republic
accepted his reworking of Mallarmé’s “L’Après-Midi d’un Faune,” offering him $15 for it. They would publish it in their August 6, 1919, issue. Enchanted, he and Stone redoubled their efforts, only to find each subsequent submission rejected. They then copied out “Lines from a Northampton Asylum,” by the early nineteenth-century English poet John Clare, and submitted it to the same magazine. It, too, was rejected. Finally they copied out a widely known masterpiece—“Kublai Khan”—and submitted that to the
New Republic
under the name of its real author, Samuel T. Coleridge. Another rejection soon arrived, along with—according to Stone—this editorial note “We like your poem, Mr. Coleridge, but we don’t think it gets anywhere much” (F 72).

During the postwar years in Oxford, Faulkner remained in aggressively role-playing mode. Following the initial season of sporting his unearned war uniform—worn not just on ceremonial occasions but at dances and on the golf course as well—he settled into an equally self-conscious role as special student at the university. He took courses in English, Spanish, and French, but he was better remembered for his cultural and sartorial pretensions. Earlier, his expensively tailored suits had earned him the title “the Count.” Now his more elaborate costuming—replete with cane, limp, and swagger—elicited from his university peers the derisive term “Count No ‘Count.” Seemingly descended from Parnassus and returned from war-torn France, Faulkner maintained his façade of imperturbability. He published poems in the university literary magazine, the
Mississippian
, as well as contributing elegant, Beardsley-inspired drawings. Annoyed classmates eventually refused to take his cultural pretensions lying down. The title of one of
his poems—a translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Fantoches”—was misprinted in the
Mississippian
as “Fantouches.” That title and the poem’s most famous line—“la lune ne garde aucune rancune”—soon generated a satiric response. There appeared in the same magazine a counter-poem—“Whotouches,” described as “Just a Parody on Count’s ‘Fantouches’ by Count Jr.”—and it ended thus: “how long the old aucune raccoon” (F 81). Journalistic ripple effects continued, and a month later the
Mississippian
published “Cane de Looney,” written by one “Peruney Prune.”

By the fall of 1921, having quit his desultory studies at the university, Faulkner found himself at loose ends. His poems, though occasionally accepted by the
Mississippian
, were turned down by national journals. Estelle’s periodic returns to Oxford—her married status blazoned in the figure of her accompanying daughter, Victoria—stimulated him and frustrated him in equal measure. Neither the stimulation nor the frustration was welcome. Finally, there was no job he could conceive of in Oxford that remotely appealed. Played out, he turned once more to the man who had bailed him out in the past and would, he hoped, do so again. Once contacted, Stone proposed the same path of escape that had worked earlier; he urged Faulkner to come north, offering to share his rooms in New Haven. So Faulkner packed his bags and headed to the Northeast for the second time in his life—to New Haven at first, preparatory to a more protracted stay in New York. He was determined to become an artist; attempting to perform that role in Oxford had become too burdensome to continue. New Haven would at least not object to his artistic striving, and Greenwich Village was widely fantasized as the sort of place that might actually abet it.

New Haven did accommodate him, and Greenwich Village amazed him. Of his first subway trip in the big city, he wrote his mother:

The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice…. Great crowds of people cramming underground, and pretty soon here comes a train, and I swear I believe the things are going a mile a minute when they stop. Well, everybody crowds on, the guards bawling and shoving, then off again, top speed. Its like being shot through a long piece of garden hose. (TH 157-8)

Amusing, but also latently horrifying: as always, Faulkner was attuned to the speed of things. The machine-fueled rush and roar of New York penetrated his nerves. Later, in
Sanctuary
, his most disturbing images would circulate around unstoppable entities hurtling at inhuman speed underground, as well as the menace of an encroaching “little rubber tube wrong
side outward” (SAN 331). Nevertheless, the generosity of Stark Young (thanks to Stone) and Elizabeth Prall took care of basic needs. Young gave him lodging until he could find a place of his own; Prall found him the Lord and Taylor job. He could look into the mirror every morning and say to himself that he was holding his own, even supporting himself in the bohemian capital of America. Yet he knew that this was hardly a sustainable life rhythm; he would never be a New Yorker. When Stone reached him, late that fall, with another proposal—this one a homecoming—it was hard to say no.

If Stone’s proposal had not been so outlandish, he might have accepted it at the outset. But the proposition was incredible. With the help of Lem Oldham (Estelle’s politically influential father), the entrepreneurial Stone had somehow persuaded U.S. senator Byron Harrison to offer Faulkner the position of postmaster of the University of Mississippi post office. Faulkner turned it down immediately. When Stone pressed again, and yet a third time (with Maud Falkner’s secret collusion to get her boy back home), he at last relented. He did so against his better judgment, which told him—even in the brevity of the moment—that this was no job for him. But what were his other options? The post office would pay $1,500 a year, more than double his salary at Lord and Taylor’s. Why not give it a try?

During the next three years, in Stone’s often-quoted words, Faulkner “made the damndest postmaster the world has ever seen” (F 109). He could not take the job seriously. His favorite activities—when he was in the office and ostensibly at work—seem to have been bridge and mah-jongg. If the weather was fair, he liked to close shop and join others for a game of golf. Eventually he set up his working quarters so as to indulge in tea with his friends, or, if alone, to do some private reading in “the Reading Room.” Reading materials were not hard to come by. He developed the habit of casually “borrowing” any journals that crossed his desk and appealed to his eye—journals intended for their Oxford recipients. Taciturn as ever in conventional situations, he saw no need to carry on conversations with his customers. He hardly knew most of them and never did care for small talk. He seemed to consider them lucky to get their mail at all; many complained that they did not get their mail at all. Discontent mounted, and eventually, in September 1924, it boiled over. Mississippi’s postal inspector, Mark Webster, sent him a three-page letter laying out seven categories of dereliction of duty alleged against him. Apparently he felt no need to read that letter either, so he was surprised when—in the midst of a bridge game in the office—Webster appeared at his door. The game was over, Faulkner
immediately realized. Silently walking away with his bridge buddies, he turned and said, “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp” (118).

The years between 1918 and 1924 testify to a wide range of sustained performances. In addition to the preposterous postmaster, there was the frustrated lover—still writing poems for his beloved Estelle, still arrested in his desire for her. There was also Count No ’Count, University of Mississippi poseur par excellence, as well as the weary, war-wounded veteran who had flown planes and seen action overseas. No less, we find the vagabond Faulkner whose gambling and boozing trips increased as he moved into his midtwenties, with many of his friends married off and in domestic arrangements. There is as well Faulkner the scoutmaster, remembered with something close to adoration by his younger charges. (He occupied this position until one of the local ministers objected to a well-known boozer sullying that sacrosanct post.) Placed next to each other, all these Faulkners appear as performances. Although each role being performed expresses some abiding dimension of the same human being, they add up to make a troubling portrait. The man who mishandles his postmaster job to that spectacular degree seems both to lack any unifying core and to be willing to make others pay for it—a man given to colorful performances yet obscurely in flight from himself. It was not only Estelle’s parents who considered him a bad bet, some six years earlier. He might have struck himself as a bad bet even now. Such self-criticism would have been sharpened by the all-but-public assessment of him leveled by his uncle John at about the same time. Standing on the central square in Oxford, his uncle had told a group of listeners, “that damn Billy is not worth a Mississippi goddam—and never will be…. He’s a Falkner and I hate to say it about my own nephew, but, hell, there’s a black sheep in everybody’s family and Billy’s ours. Not worth a cent” (F 117–8).

Not worth a cent. To what extent did this unforgiving assessment roil inside the young man who made his way to New Orleans a few months after the Post Office debacle? Did the newcomer to Sherwood Anderson’s literary circle harbor a set of doubts about himself—more as a human being than as a fledgling writer—that functioned as an unwanted secret sharer? Does Elmer’s bumbling helplessness, written while Faulkner lodged in Paris later the same year (1925), testify to something still unformed, exposed, and damaged inside him—a defective “clotting which is you” that would unclot if not protected by carefully maintained posturing? Did the published
author of
Soldiers’ Pay
and
Mosquitoes
recognize in Liveright’s harsh verdict on
Flags
an inner incoherence that nothing was likely to straighten out, least of all marriage to a just-divorced Estelle? Whatever the answers to these questions, the man who wrote a trio of masterpieces between 1928 and 1930—
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
, and
Sanctuary
—was someone in trouble, a man who was stumbling. And writing masterpieces inseparable from it.

He was too busy doing it to realize what he had done. He would later look back in amazement at that “one matchless time” when almost everything he put on paper took on incandescent form.
⁶
Decades later, in Manila in 1955, he would say “The writer’s got to add the gift of his talent; he has got to take the truth and set it on fire” (LG 201). At that time he might, on looking back, have been unable to see in
Sanctuary
any embodiment of “the truth.” But he could not have denied that in
Sanctuary
he had set something on fire—his career itself. “I have created quite a sensation,” he would write Estelle from New York in November 1931 (SL 53). Prospective publishers were buzzing about him like bees about honey, competing with each other to sign the next book. How had this sudden courtship come about?

It started with the publication of
The Sound and the Fury
. Only a modest popular success, the book made professional critics sit up and take notice. He would never receive a more penetrating encomium than that penned in 1929 by Evelyn Scott—a contemporary novelist whose review was included in a special edition (a thousand copies) of the book: “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 most of what was claimed for it by the Victorians, and the spectacle is moving as no sugar-coated drama ever could be” (CH 78). Even though baffled by his procedures, critics recognized that Faulkner was breaking new ground—that no American novelist had written like this before.

One critic even grasped that the book’s experimental procedures placed on its reader an extraordinary burden: “This is not an easy book,” the
Nashville Tennessean
reviewer conceded. “It cannot be read objectively; the reader, if he is to savor the best in this book, must surrender himself entirely” (CH 84). “You can do it too easy,” Anderson had warned. Beginning with
The Sound and the Fury
, Faulkner would henceforth rarely be easy—not on himself, not on his reader. To inhabit Benjy and Quentin, Darl and Vardaman,
to get inside their “damn heads,” he had had to yield up his own defenses—his masks of superiority and pose of indifference. He had had to write them as if wholly inside them, seeing and feeling what they saw and felt, judging as they judged—but never judging them. To savor the best in this and his subsequent masterpieces, readers would likewise have to forego defensive judgment—and plunge. Some were beginning to do so.

The Sound and the Fury
began it,
As I Lay Dying
expanded on it, and
Sanctuary
set it into juggernaut motion. What contributed most to the Faulkner “sensation” was perhaps not so much the brilliance of any of these novels, nor even that of the three of them together. It was the astonishing pace at which they had appeared, meteorically, between October 1929 and February 1931—in less than sixteen months. Almost overnight, he had become a literary phenomenon, a name in every serious fiction reader’s face. For a decade, he had been dreaming of such recognition, but it had taken the fantasy form of
might-be
. When it finally hit—in 1931—he was unprepared. Encountering the arrival of his own fame—a reality, like other realities, “in advance of itself”—the best he could muster was a bewildered acceptance. Like the young Joe Christmas (in
Light in August)
, he was being catapulted into experiences that escaped his ordering framework. Like Joe as well, he might have glimpsed that he would never understand what was happening. At most, he might develop practices to make it manageable. These would only “come later, when life had begun to go so fast that accepting would take the place of knowing and believing…. The accepting was to come later, along with the whole sum of entire outrage to credulity” (LA 530). He stumbled into fame.