B006JHRY9S EBOK (32 page)

In all of Faulkner’s portrayals of relations between blacks and whites, there are few moments more moving than this one. Centering on a frail old white man reconnecting—in his mind and through his fingers—with his long-absent black kin, the scene is unashamedly paternal, but it is not condescending. This startling connection transforms the woman before him and her infant into beings at once beyond acknowledgment yet his own. He ends by giving her not just the envelope of money Roth has left but also General Compson’s ancient hunting horn. Henceforth the wilderness hunt—so hierarchical in its arrangements of race and gender—will take on in Ike’s memories blackness as well. The recognitions he has been forced to undergo in this scene are—like most genuine recognitions—unwanted and beyond accommodation. He has lived too long, his innocence painfully ending before his life does.

Something similar is true for his creator as well. In his most compelling fictions of race, Faulkner recognized himself—uncomfortably, guiltily, responsibly—in the mirror of black distress at which he gazed. Paternal, not paternalistic. He knew he was complicit—that his entire life in the South entailed ineffaceable complicities. The solution to the race dilemma in America, should one ever be put into practice, would not be proposed by him. Rather than solutions, his work—at its best—would act as an unnerving dark twin intimating to its white reader: “yes, you, too, are in this mirror, you will need to find a way to live with yourself insofar as you see yourself here.”
Light in August
and
Absalom, Absalom!
and
Go Down, Moses
constitute the most capacious mirror Faulkner was able to construct. It is not a magic mirror, and nothing we see reflected in it is likely to give much cause
for satisfaction. But none of his white peers in the twentieth century even attempted to see—and say—what he saw when he gazed into it.

He would write once again about race relations. And he would seek to play his part—confusedly and at some risk to himself—in the civil rights turmoil that was already brewing. His last race-focused novel,
Intruder in the Dust
, appeared in 1948. Its keen (and easily decipherable) attention to contemporary racial agitation doubtless played a part in his being awarded the Nobel Prize two years later. But that novel’s stance moved from paternal to paternalistic. Its plot was simple. Lucas Beauchamp, now an old man charged with a murder he did not commit, had to be saved from lynching. Faulkner ensured that it would take white people cooperating together to save him. Lucas’s efforts in his own behalf were to be quietly stymied (he remained locked up in jail). Thus the motion and emotion in this novel belonged to the Southern whites who labored to clear him. Not that this number was large. Lucas’s rescue turned on a pair of boys and an old lady who refused to sit by and see injustice done. Because Faulkner was too honest to propose that the larger adult white South wanted anything other than to lynch this “uppity nigger,” the novel’s strategy for liberating Lucas emerged as more than a little sentimental. On one matter, Faulkner was crystal clear. Lucas’s dilemma was not one in which well-meaning Northern outsiders had any business interfering. Lucas’s defense lawyer, Gavin Stevens, referred to his silent client throughout as Sambo. One wonders how much is gained by freeing a black man only on condition that he continue to answer to Sambo. Once again, looking forward and looking backward merge as incoherently fused dimensions of Faulkner’s racial imagination.

Intruder
, at any rate, was commercially successful (its first several weeks of sale outpaced even
Sanctuary’s
record). MGM not only paid $50,000 for screen rights but went on to produce the movie. Much of it was shot in Oxford during the spring of 1949—Faulkner helped the director, Clarence Brown, cast local acquaintances in several bit parts—and the world premiere would take place in Oxford that fall. The town appreciated the business generated by the several weeks’ work required to shoot the film, whatever their private thoughts about their most celebrated citizen. As the filming hullabaloo approached its end, Estelle decided that a fitting conclusion would be a party at Rowan Oak itself. There was only one hitch. A Puerto Rican named Juano Hernandez had been signed on to play the principal role in the film—that of Lucas Beauchamp. Faulkner had even helped Hernandez work on a black accent that would sound more like Mississippi than the islands. Such professional cooperation was one thing,
but attendance at a Rowan Oak party was another. Hernandez was himself presentable, but if the Faulkners invited him, they would have to invite his Negro hosts in Oxford. After some soul-searching, they determined they could not do that. “So the whole crew, with the exception of the portrayer of Lucas Beauchamp, came out to Rowan Oak” (F 503). We recall an earlier arc of nonrecognition launched by the closing of a door in young Thomas Sutpen’s face. Trash like him were to use the back door of a white plantation. A kindred arc repeats itself in 1949 at Rowan Oak.
“Maybe happen is never once,”
Faulkner had written in
Absalom
. Whatever images he saw in that mirror posed by Juano Hernandez’s black hosts, they did not figure for him as dark twins deserving acknowledgment.

He was not unconscious the whole time. Specific details would flare into focus, then flee as swiftly as they had come. All he knew for sure was that he could not move, though he could not remember why. Where was he anyway? Sprawled out—half sitting, half lying—he pressed tentatively on his pounding head, trying to frame this moment of pure distress. An image arose in his mind: he was in New York, at his favorite hotel, the Algonquin. He had come here to complete the contracts with Random House for
The Unvanquished:
which meant that it was November 1937. He had come here to forget something as well—he suddenly knew what that was—but he had less luck there. Meta Carpenter was who he wanted to forget, who now appeared in his mind’s eye with aching clarity. He concentrated again, his screen of consciousness widened. Depressed—he had his reasons for it—he had been drinking steadily the night before. He had drifted from bar to bar, then seen no need to stop once he returned to his room. He vaguely remembered the sensation of booze sliding down his throat, the sought-after numbness it radiated. But how had that moment led to this one? Straining once more, he got hold of another image. The last thing he had done was to make his way into the bathroom and settle onto the toilet seat, bottle in hand. Time for one more swig before bed.

Bright sunlight bore down on him, and the room was unaccountably full of cold, moving air. A glance downward showed him he was wearing only his undershorts. Looking up, he saw an open bathroom window. Had he imagined last night that he was still in Mississippi, where on going to bed he would often open the window a crack, even in winter? Then he
recognized the noise he had been hearing for some time now: the hissing sound of a steam pipe, just behind him, his back resting on it. He had passed out in this bathroom. His mind, still whirling, permitted larger oases of lucidity. He realized suddenly that he was in the wrong place: he had no business lying against that pipe. He could tell from its sound how hot it had to be, but his back—which ought to know—had reported no signals of pain. It didn’t even hurt now. How long had he been in this position? When would he find the energy and focus needed to get up again? Like’s Joe Christmas caught in the dietitian’s room in
Light in August
—lying flat out in his own vomit and realizing that, for better and surely for worse, he was completely in others’ hands—Faulkner waited for someone to come. Eventually someone always did. This was a hell of a way to begin the day.

The moment is emblematic in its self-destructiveness, though its gravity is new. He had been drinking heavily—and occasionally passing out—for over twenty years. But up to now he had been lucky enough to avoid New York hotel steam pipes, as well as other complications linked to a lifetime of boozing. Some time later that morning—minutes? hours?—he heard knocking, at first cautious and then louder. He could not move, and he had nothing to say, so he waited. Within a few minutes Jim Devine—Random House fellow writer and boon drinking companion—had managed to get the door opened. Devine found him there, moved him gingerly, then gasped. The wound inflicted on his lower back by the steam pipe must have looked pretty alarming. Though it didn’t hurt yet, Faulkner had done himself real damage this time. The sought-after numbness that the booze provided was at the same time a dangerous abdication, an invitation to further troubles. These third-degree burns (the size of a man’s palm) would eventually require several skin grafts—grafts that in turn became infected and never entirely took. His sleeping, not good in the best of times, was all but impossible for the next few months, and his lower back would never forgive how cavalierly he had treated it. The doctor that Devine took Faulkner to stared at his patient’s back, then at the patient himself, and asked, “Why do you do this?” Grimacing with incipient pain but showing no other emotion, eyes hooded by emphatic curved brows, Faulkner responded, “Because I like to” (F 387).

Abdication: such excessive drinking—revealing his incapacity to manage himself—led to his need to be managed by others. In this instance, Jim Devine not only nursed him through the worst of his convalescence, but (urged by Bob Haas) accompanied him by train to Oxford, once Faulkner was well enough to leave New York. Hal Smith had played a similar
chaperone role at the Virginia Writers’ Conference in 1931. Later, both Bob Haas and Saxe Commins of Random House would more than once find themselves drafted into the service of managing their self-destructive genius. Malcolm Cowley occasionally stepped in as well, to play the role of nurse-manager in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Joan Williams and then Jean Stein inherited something of the same responsibilities later. In Hollywood during the 1940s, his friend and fellow scriptwriter “Buzz” Bezzerides recurrently took on this job.

In addition to these caretakers, there were the various black servants Faulkner would employ to drive for him and tend to domestic needs. Nor is this to take into account the policy adopted by larger institutions that occasionally sponsored him (like the State Department): to make sure that potential crisis managers would be on hand whenever Faulkner served as an unofficial cultural ambassador during the 1950s. He had become widely identified as a man who required handlers, and he recognized himself in that mirror. For some time now he had been casting himself in that role. To an annoyed Hal Smith he had written (in January 1932)—after one of his hurriedly summoned managers had persuaded him to part with some unpublished poems—“I’m sorry…. goddam me for getting mixed up with it and goddam you for sending me off … in the shape I was in. I don’t think it will happen again. But if I should do so, for God’s sake find Ben [Wasson] and turn me on to him next time” (SL 55). If I mess up again, “turn me on to” a more trustworthy manager. The stance is that of a self-accepting
ingénu
—a man who sees himself as a receptive “me” rather than an active “I.” Such a man cannot be expected to take care of himself in intricate situations: his calling as writer of genius preempts the responsibilities that normally go with adulthood.

Convalescence after the 1937 Algonquin disaster was slow. He was unable to keep to his commitments in the next week or so—including an emotionally fraught lunch with Meta Carpenter and her new husband, the gifted German pianist Wolfgang Rebner. She had recently introduced the two men; she was intent on them liking each other. Faulkner knew only too well that Rebner had become her husband because he himself had refused to go through the distress—divorce from Estelle and separation from his daughter, Jill—required to step into that role. His back by now was torturing him; he was not up to seeing the Rebners together at this moment. Meta would have to understand. But she didn’t understand, and his failure to show up at the restaurant sent her into panic. She rushed (with Rebner in tow) to the Algonquin and then up to his room. Like Devine earlier,
she knocked softly, then loudly, then managed to get the door open. She found him lying naked on the bed, barely able to move, his body reeking with burn medication. Rebner looked on at a distance, nonjudgmentally. Meta and Faulkner stared at each other, then he mumbled, “I started drinking…. You know why” (ALG 224).

Drinking had become a sort of rough spa meant to provide sanctuary—a place where no one else could follow, an attempt to distance himself from the unmanageable stresses of his life. The foregoing vignette reveals a number of the elements motivating Faulkner’s dependence on alcohol. Three places are here involved—Hollywood (Meta’s setting), New York (his publishing center), and Oxford (home: the opposite, in different ways, of both other places). Three people are involved as well: Meta (his mistress, his single chance at successful love) silhouetted against Estelle and Jill (his now-rejected wife, whom he would divorce if he could, and his precious daughter, whom he would lose if he left Estelle). The elements that come together to launch a bout of uncontrolled drinking can be reshuffled. Sometimes such drinking is called forth by the near-hysterical rush of feeling set loose in him by the completing of a novel. Sometimes it erupts as a means for negotiating (i.e., avoiding) encounters that raise his anxiety level beyond tolerance: a group of professors and writers discussing “southern letters,” a major New York interview for discussing race relations in America. Sometimes it occurs for reasons no one—including Faulkner himself—can fathom. But it does not occur as mere bodily event, as the predictable reenactment of an illness—alcoholism—with no psychological profile. That “diagnosis” would make Faulkner’s chemical dependence essentially the same as anyone else’s: alcohol calls the shots, not the profile of the alcoholic. It omits the intricate algebra of this troubled man’s encounters with the world.
¹
In what follows, I argue that alcohol provides a revealing window into Faulkner’s psychological and social makeup.