B006JHRY9S EBOK (21 page)

The only countermove to Estelle’s marriage to Franklin that Faulkner had been able to conceive of that might be weighty and engrossing enough to take him out of his grief was entry into the war. Whether that entry would take place by way of Canada or America, he insisted that it be in the air. The acronym
RAF
would remain a precious one he never tired of mentioning. His five months of flight training in Canada would not only give him material for a number of stories and at least four novels but also nurture 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—as one of his biographers has noted—“were almost as precise as manufacturers’ schematic drawings” (F 63). Whatever else drew him, one irresistible aspect was the planes’ seeming weightlessness: mere “kites” constructed of wood and canvas and wire, powered by unreliable engines. Soon he could distinguish expertly among the different military craft at the Canadian air base, and he was writing home to Maud of solo flights. These vignettes would later expand, balloonistically, into the higher regions of fantasy—flights, crashes, and injuries—all unsupported by evidence.

As early as September 1919, he acted—in secret—on the real state of affairs. He had learned that one of his University of Mississippi gambling buddies, Robert Buntin, was a trained pilot; and he confided in Buntin:
“Everybody thinks I can fly, but I can’t” (F 79). At Faulkner’s instigation, they sneaked away to practice flying. Soon he began to realize that one crucial dimension of flying resisted mastery. He had trouble landing his craft safely—trouble that, when he took up flying later, he would never fully surmount. During the 1920s, when he was too strapped for cash and caught up in other roles perhaps, the love of flying went underground. But once
Sanctuary
hit big, money—at least the promise of it—started to arrive, and new opportunities arose. Hollywood had entered his life in 1932, and MGM wanted their famous RAF veteran to work on scripts about flying.

In early 1933, he decided it was time to renew his infatuation. He contacted Vernon Omlie, a professional instructor who ran a flying school in Memphis, to set up a series of lessons. “He said he wanted to get his nerve back,” Omlie recalled, “and learn to fly all over again before anybody knew what he was doing” (F 314). Omlie agreed to support Faulkner’s elaborate fiction of himself as the fighter-pilot who had become gun-shy as a consequence of two crashes during the war. He needed lessons to overcome his anxiety, and Omlie was an ideal instructor. In addition, Omlie served as portal to a larger world of barnstorming pilots performing daredevil stunts in the 1930s. Faulkner required some seventeen hours of dual control training with Omlie before he was ready in April 1933 to solo in Omlie’s big Waco.

The rest of that year he would continue to fly the Waco, sometimes taking Johncy’s boys with him. His three brothers were not long in sharing his fascination with flight, and he encouraged them to do so. He was not only hooked; his delight in flying seemed close to manic. When Estelle delivered her next baby, in June 1933, he waited only eleven weeks before taking the infant Jill and her mother up on joy rides. Later, the four brothers would do some modest barnstorming together; they would even be advertised as “The Flying Faulkners.” In the fall of 1933 he took the plunge and purchased Omlie’s Waco. The plane was not cheap; it cost him $6,000. If we consider that he had paid the same amount three years earlier for Rowan Oak and its four acres, we get a measure of how far he went to indulge his obsession. As his most recent biographer has noted, a 1933 photo of him standing in front of the Waco possesses a unique feature. Like virtually no other picture, this one shows him smiling broadly, his relaxed face beaming with the pride of ownership.
⁹

His father Murry had been in bad health for some time now, and his heart condition had worsened during the hot summer of 1932. After suffering a major attack on August ii, Murry succumbed ten days later. Faulkner
was in Hollywood at the time, working for Howard Hawks on a screenplay of his own story “Turn About.” The only reference to his father’s passing I know of occurs in a letter he wrote a month later to Ben Wasson: “I had to leave Cal. before I finished it [the script] because of my father’s death.” The letter continues: “I hope to hell Paramount takes Sanctuary. Dad left mother solvent for only about i year. Then it is me” (SL 65). A father’s dying, so few words from the son in response to it. The rest of the letter is concerned with his screenplay activities and financial woes. Faulkner’s brevity is mutely revealing, though none of his biographers explores its resonance. Murry Falkner is eclipsed (by Faulkner himself, as well as his biographers) in the bigger narrative of his famous son. As though to rub it in, the local obituary spelled Murry’s surname “Faulkner,” furthering his erasure as one Murry Falkner who had tried, and failed, to make his life make sense. Many years later, as Maud neared her own death, she asked her oldest son about the afterlife: “Will I have to see your father there?” “No,” he said, “not if you don’t want to.” “That’s good,” she said. “I never did like him” (F 679). Faulkner would laugh when he repeated this vignette, just as he would smile when he repeated the earlier cigar-and-pipe one. Both vignettes contributed to the ongoing erasure of Murry Falkner. Together, Faulkner and his mother completed his eclipse.

After his father’s death, Faulkner felt it incumbent on himself to offer Dean whatever measure he could of the paternal support that was no longer there. The widowed Maud was growing increasingly—and, Faulkner suspected, unhealthily—dependent on Dean. For his part, Dean—though likable and well-adjusted—floundered from job to job. Faulkner thought he needed help, and determined to provide it. Dean welcomed this renewed attention. He had long adored his brilliant oldest brother, going so far as to cultivate a thin mustache that resembled Faulkner’s, and even adding a
u
to his name so as to tighten their intimacy.

Perhaps the air, Faulkner might have pondered, would offer Dean a space for flourishing that the land had not. Since Dean already loved to fly, why shouldn’t he consider doing so professionally? Of the four brothers, Dean showed signs of becoming far and away the most gifted pilot. It made good sense, Faulkner decided, to put up the money to pay for Dean’s further flight instruction with Omlie. Omlie found Dean to be a star student, and by the spring of 1934, Dean had actually moved in with Omlie and his wife. He was getting a professional education in flying, en route to becoming a sort of junior partner in Omlie’s aviation business. So Faulkner took the logical next step and worked out an agreement to transfer ownership of his
Waco to Dean. With the Waco, Dean and Vernon could do air shows in the nearby states—Tennessee and Missouri as well as Mississippi. It seemed a good plan, and Dean’s life was taking on focus. The previous fall, he had met an adventurous young woman named Louise Hale. She liked him immediately, and she enjoyed the scruffily glamorous world that went with him: Vernon and his wife, the other aviators, the airports and barnstorming flights. Within weeks, Dean proposed marriage, and Louise accepted, despite his having warned her: “Mother and Bill will always come first” (F 338). Soon after their marriage, to Dean and Louise’s delight, she learned that she was pregnant.

During the years following
Light in August
, Faulkner’s letters spoke of materials that would find their place in some six more novels:
Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, Requiem for a Nun
, and the Snopes trilogy
(The Hamlet, The Town
, and
The Mansion)
. It would take him twenty-five years to deliver all the books gestating in his mind in the early 1930s. Not mentioned in that group, however, is the novel Faulkner suddenly, at breakneck speed, wrote in two months during the fall of 1934
—Pylon
. He had probably been conceiving
Pylon
unawares for some time; perhaps it had been simmering ever since the balloon episodes of childhood. At the least, Faulkner’s fascination with flying—rekindled in early 1933—made the writing of this novel virtually effortless. “He has got to take the truth and set it on fire,” Faulkner would claim in that 1955 interview in Manila. What in the drama of flying set Faulkner’s imagination aflame?
Pylon
lets us approach that question.

As his most recent biographer has noted,
Pylon
is neither the most audacious nor the most experimental of Faulkner’s novels. But it is the most extravagant. Only an intermittent intellectual rigor keeps its prose from appearing alarmingly overheated. One need not go far to find the cause of the overheating: the spectacle of the planes themselves and—by extension—of the men who fly them:

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. (PYL 793)

The fascination of the planes shimmers in this passage. They pulse with a form of being that mocks all human structures (protective sanctuaries) erected to make life safely livable, organized, mutual. Free from the messiness of human attachment (”painwebbed”), these murderous objects exist
unto themselves. Immune to development over time, they beam forth a primitive cohesion eons older than the interdependency of later human arrangements. Another description extends this resonance: “Waspwaisted, wasplight, still, trim, vicious, small and immobile, they seemed to poise without weight, as though made of paper for the sole purpose of resting upon the shoulders of the dungareeclad men about them” (787). The passage emphasizes the most incredible dimension of the planes. Nothing so frail should be able to move so fast and do so much damage in so little time. Led out onto the tarmac, they seem docile, obeying the men who service and fly them, as they seem to balance poised on their keepers’ shoulders. But they can unexpectedly sting: “waspwaisted” may also recall Faulkner’s earlier “mosquitoes”—those winged creatures capable of diving down and deranging the lives of those they suddenly attack.

Speed is the common element, speed that exceeds survivable frequencies. Faulkner’s prose strains—in its verbal pressing of words together (“pain-webbed,” “wasplight,” “dungareeclad”), as well as its relentless deployment of adjective upon adjective—to “say” such objects (and their world) outside the range of conventional ways of saying. As though—to be faithful to these extraordinary machines and the lives that circulate recklessly, obsessively, around them—convention must be stood on its head. Marital convention is jettisoned, in the anarchic arrangement of two flyers sharing the same woman (none of the three knows who has fathered the child resulting from their promiscuous intercourse). Likewise, capitalist convention dictating prudence, hard work, calculation, and eventual profit has little purchase on them.
Pylon
pointedly pits its nonchalant yet desperate flyers against the manipulative, moneyed bosses who run the airport and advertise the races. These men are ultimately concerned with profit; their behavior is based on a cost/benefit model. On that model, one moves through time by establishing procedures for arriving at the anticipated bottom line. Not so for the pilots. Their time line has little to do with a calculated increase in profit. “Because they aint human like us; they couldn’t turn those pylons like they do if they had human blood and senses and they wouldn’t want to or dare to if they just had human brains” (PYL 804).

As the quoted passage shows, Faulkner does not sentimentalize the pilots. Yet they escape the withering critique the narrative levies on the money men. Colonel Feinman, patron and financier of the new airport that sponsors these races, comes in for especially virulent narrative treatment. Feinman—or “Behindman,” as the flyers scornfully refer to him—has made his pile in the sewer business. The text delights in juxtaposing his disgusting,
but profitable, traffic in human shit against the flyers’ transcendent risking of their lives in the air. “It aint the money” recurs as a refrain for understanding the flyers’ economically irrational behavior. Does Faulkner’s lifelong tenderness toward vagabondage—his frequent references to himself as a bum, as one who spent his prolonged youth refusing or savaging the jobs that came his way—insinuate itself here?

The pilots who compete for the prizes are both desperate for the money and cavalierly dismissive of it. Mere cash is beneath contempt as a motive for directing behavior. Yet
Pylon
is rife with monetary transactions (one critic has counted some sixty-seven of them). The unnamed Reporter (through whose mesmerized eyes Faulkner narrates this novel) is a spendthrift—with others’ money. Borrowing gobs of cash from his inexplicably generous boss, the Reporter takes dozens of cab rides, throwing dollar bills at the drivers as he rushes away from their vehicles. One is reminded of Faulkner’s similarly conflicted stance toward money. He would borrow—casually and extravagantly—from his publishers (sometimes not asking permission in advance). In letters to his agents and editors, he would also obsess endlessly over his need for money. Whenever he was in temporary possession of it, it poured out of him. He would have liked to be Maecenas. To allow one’s life to be ruled by money appeared to him as a form of thralldom. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he had fumed in 1924, “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.” Being fired from that job had liberated him from a routine he detested to the point of scandalous inattention. Scheming to make one’s money appreciate—in and of itself—struck him as no less despicable. It signaled a slavish devotion to incrementally paced hoarding—a sort of Yankee-inspired tiptoeing through life, always checking the credit-debit sheet. It plotted life in an anal and unworthy fashion.

By contrast, the flyers risked their lives utterly, each time they rose into the air. “They had escaped the compulsion of accepting a past and a future” (FIU 36), Faulkner would say of them later, at the University of Virginia. In
Pylon
itself, the same point emerges starkly: “And the ship is all right,” one of them says, “except you wont know until you are in the air whether or not you can take it off and you wont know until you are back on the ground and standing up again whether or not you can land it” (906). So much for plans for mastering life in advance, for calculating before and after. To fly those “kites” is to experience time as pure presence. We will know what is happening when it has happened; no prior preparation is any good. Or rather,
prepare as we can, such preparation is puny and futile. Once we leave the sanctuary of the earth, we are flaunting the sinister gods—the unknowable force that Mr. Compson calls the “dark diceman” (SF 1013). Or, as Faulkner would later (in
The Hamlet)
describe the time-model implicit in the flyers’ behavior: “Breathing is a sight-draft dated yesterday” (313). As though our breath itself had an unappealable liquidation date of yesterday written on it, collectible on sight. The encounter could come at any moment; it will give no prior notice. No experience brought this more powerfully home to Faulkner than flying planes.