B006JHRY9S EBOK (33 page)

Alcohol penetrates to Faulkner’s private core as a human being. But several aspects of its appeal locate more broadly outside him—as dimensions of a larger (and typically masculine) history of family, region, and country. Male Falkners had been drinking excessively, and being dragged to clinics to dry out, long before William was born. Colonel W. C. Falkner was an inveterate drinker; legends of his alcoholic exploits were passed on to his great-grandson. As for the Young Colonel’s extravagance, Faulkner could draw on both recounted stories and personal experience. He remembered the Buick/brick/bank vignette as though it had happened to him, and long-ago afternoon séances with the charming but irascible and often sodden old
man remained in his mind. Faulkner had seen a good deal of his grandfather in those early years; Murry’s quarrel with J. W. T. was never his. Finally, his father himself was widely known in Oxford as a “mean drunk”—one all too likely to move from intoxication to violence. As well, Faulkner was unlikely to forget those vivid instances of Murry being hustled off by Maud to take the “Keeley Cure.” The boys were brought along, so they could recognize the evils of alcohol (and—this part unspoken—witness at pedagogic length the degradation of their father). The logic was inescapable and, for Faulkner, perfectly normal. Men in his family drank to excess—all of his brothers had trouble with alcohol as well. Wrought into the fiber of their identity, alcohol was their tacitly affirmed way of (not) coping.

That notion of manhood-and-alcohol went beyond Falkners. It partook more broadly of a Southern male mystique—one not limited to the South but prevalent there. Southern boys (long before Faulkner, all during his youth, and during mine as well some forty-five years later) often learned to drink excessively, early on. Faulkner not only stole from his grandfather’s cache of whiskey while working in his Oxford bank, during his late teens, but was already engaging in sustained bouts of drinking two or three years earlier. He did not, as a young man, gain the sobriquet of town drunk without having put in some effort. More speculatively, one can say that many Southern men sought, and found, a haven of male camaraderie by way of drink. The shared bottle of booze was a talisman allowing them to secede from the world of womenfolk and adult responsibilities—to declare once more their untamed independence. “We don’t want him tame,” Sam Fathers says of the wild dog, Lion, that eventually takes down the great bear, Old Ben, and forfeits his life in doing so
(Go Down, Moses)
. There are few values more abidingly lodged in Faulkner than the desire to remain untamed. Throughout his life, he would refuse to compromise, come to terms—as though doing so would amount to caving in.

Alcohol-soaked behavior stands out as a salient dimension of Faulkner’s rebellious teens and twenties. The forays with Phil Stone to Clarksdale, Memphis, and the Gulf Coast; the gambling ventures and speakeasies with Reno De Vaux; the heavy drinking with Sherwood Anderson’s New Orleans coterie: these experiences unfolded as rituals of male bonding as much as they embodied a deliberate intent to flout the law. It is as though early on in Faulkner’s psyche, the law began to take the shadowy form of a humorless judgmental female who said No. It’s not hard to see Maud Falkner lurking behind this figure, as well as admirable Jenny DuPre in
Flags in the Dust
and odious Mrs. Compson in
The Sound and the Fury
. Such
older women seem to have accepted the social decree to abide by the rules and be grown up, but boys—and then men—in the South liked to escape by getting drunk. It was a sanctioned form of playing hooky. Faulkner did not refuse to go past the eleventh grade for nothing.

In addition, there was the influence of Prohibition. Getting hold of liquor was already an enchanting notion for underage boys together on a night out. It became doubly alluring when federal law mandated that the mere possession of liquor could land you in jail. To the risk of purchasing it was added the risk of drinking it. One could end up unknowingly with “Old Jake,” a villainous rum-based concoction that often paralyzed its drinkers.
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And a range of entertaining narratives attached to illicit booze: what it was composed of, where it originated, the travails undergone in transporting it to the places of purchase and consumption. To engage in such activities was to enter the romance of law-breaking, to show oneself a risk-taker among others fraternally bonded by the same daring. Thanks to Prohibition, drinking excessively—under dangerous conditions—became for many men a normal expression of independence.

Finally, there was for Faulkner the decades-long ritual of hunting in the Delta. As early as his midteens, he had joined Phil Stone to participate in General Stone’s annual November bear and deer hunting expedition. Each year he looked forward to renewing this ceremony. It confirmed his sense of himself as a woodsman in the female-free company of other woodsmen, as well as in relation to the wilderness and its creatures, rather than an impecunious youth yet to accept a place in the labor force. Those two weeks in the big woods were amply lubricated by sustained nighttime drinking, during which the pleasures of the day, memories of the past, and expectations of the future would find their way into men-speech. As Faulkner put it in
Go Down, Moses
,

the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude…. There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him [Ike McCaslin] that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank. (GDM 140–1)

But this sanctuary of retreat from women and domestic responsibilities could not last forever. A heavy bout of drinking during a hunting trip in late 1940 ended for him in unconsciousness and something alarmingly like
kidney seizure or a perforated ulcer. Frightened, the other hunters rushed Faulkner home, where he soon recovered. He would continue for the next decade and longer to participate in the November Delta hunts, but his heart seemed less in it, and his drinking got increasingly out of control.

The first hospitalization for alcohol abuse had occurred in June 1936, at Wright’s Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi. Wright’s would also, twenty-six later, be the locus of his last hospitalization for drinking—and his sudden death by coronary one day after he was admitted (July 6, 1962). Between these two hospitalizations were too many others to recount. One of his critics reckons that by the 1950s, Faulkner was undergoing hospitalization as often as every three months.
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The cluster of underlying reasons for his alcoholism probably never altered much, but no form of therapy made any lasting difference. Such therapies ranged from injection into the body of chemicals designed to make alcohol repugnant to the system (the Keeley Cure) to electroshock treatment and psychoanalytic sessions. None of it succeeded in separating Faulkner from the bottle. Rough spas: he seems to have believed, at the deepest level of his being, that he
needed
periodically to drink himself into oblivion. It was his chosen way of shaking off anxiety, as a wet dog shakes off water. When younger, he would emerge from these binges refreshed, even energized, and ready to return to his commitments—as though he had drained the battery all the way, and it was now being effectively recharged. For the last twenty years of his life, he tolerated the booze less and less well, though he indulged in it with the same frequency.

His wrestling with friends and family who sought to keep him from alcohol could seem comic if it weren’t laden with pathos. Here is Buzz Bezzerides’ account of trying, in Hollywood in late 1944, to get Faulkner to stop. The two of them were in Faulkner’s rented rooms, and he was already well on his way to oblivion. Bezzerides’ first ploy was to threaten to cut off the supply. He left the room, and on returning found copies of all of Faulkner’s novels lined up on the coffee table and autographed for Buzz. “Now will you give me a drink?” Faulkner pleaded. Remembering that a doctor had once mentioned that excessive drinking could bring on heart trouble, Bezzerides changed tack and appealed to Faulkner not to “go that way” (F 461). When he returned to the room a few minutes later, Faulkner was nowhere to be seen, and two bookshelves were bare. Bewildered, Bezzerides rushed to the porch, where he glimpsed Faulkner some distance away, struggling to heave two large sacks full of books up a steep hill. “Bill, what are you doing?” he cried. Through gritted teeth Faulkner answered,
“I want to see if I’ve got a bad heart or not.” Desperate now, the athletic Bezzerides sprinted toward Faulkner, gathered him in his arms, and headed toward his car. He was taking his friend to the hospital. Apparently understanding Bezzerides’ intentions, Faulkner twisted wildly in his arms. “Bill, what are you trying to do?” the overwrought Bezzerides screamed. “I’m trying to get down,” Faulkner answered. They both stopped, looked at each other, and broke into hysterical laughter.

His stance toward alcohol was sometimes more casual. When Dave Hemphill, a Hollywood acquaintance in early 1936, grasped the gravity of Faulkner’s boozing, he asked incredulously, “Bill, how can you keep this up?” Faulkner’s reply, recycled in various situations for decades, varied but little: “Dave, there’s a lot of nourishment in an acre of corn” (F 364). As he entered his fifties, he was saying this mantra less, and ending up in hospitals more. His plight had become desperate by August 1952. He had suffered a number of serious riding falls that spring and summer, producing two compression fractures. A few months later he injured his back again—while sailing—and X-rays showed five compression fractures (some of them probably dating much further back). He was suffering convulsive seizures as well. At a doctor’s suggestion of a spinal tap he fled as usual—he had a lifelong distrust of the medical establishment—and holed up in Rowan Oak. By then he looked so ravaged that even Estelle—inured to seeing him in states of alcoholic disrepair—panicked. She summoned Random House’s Saxe Cummins to come down from New York for emergency help. Cummins came and managed to get Faulkner readmitted into the Gartley-Ramsay psychiatric hospital in Memphis. Writing home about his incapacitated author, Cummins said: “He mumbles incoherently and is totally incapable of controlling his bodily functions. This is more than a case of acute alcoholism. It is a complete disintegration of a man” (WFSH 285).

There remains a final vignette perhaps sadder than all the others. Jill Faulkner told this one, culled from a reservoir of painful childhood memories. (“Given his independent personality,” she once said with considerable restraint, “he shouldn’t have burdened himself with a family” [WFSH 294].) As one of her childhood birthdays approached, she saw her father moving toward a binge. Such binges, she knew better than most, typically lasted from a few days to a couple of weeks. Faulkner would consume bottle after bottle in his bedroom—dressed only in underwear and uninterested in eating—and would not stop until ready to stop. Alarmed, Jill begged him to hold off until after her party. Hearing this plea once too often, Faulkner told her, “No one remembers Shakespeare’s children.” Perhaps,
but Faulkner’s child remembered that zinger—whether her father did or not—and I heard her cite it in a TV interview some two decades later. Faulkner’s tenderness toward his daughter was demonstrable and deep, but she grew up a troubled child, in the shadow of an unpredictable and (often) unapproachable father. (As she told one biographer, she “ached for mediocrity” [294].) When in 1954 Jill met her husband-to-be, Paul Summers, she was enraptured to learn how Summers had responded on hearing of her famous father. “Who’s he?” Summers had said—a remark that elicited from Jill an instant conviction: “he’s for me” (294).

No single cause emerges as the key to Faulkner’s abuse of alcohol. A chorus of contributing motives—all of them dimensions of his encounter with the world—cooperate, increasing his susceptibility to this disease.
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Hypersensitive from childhood on, Faulkner toughened himself as he could. At an early age he knew himself destined to write, but he knew as well that Southern culture viewed writing as a sissified vocation appropriate for women. Malcolm Cowley—who came to know Faulkner well during the later 1940s—was alert to this cultural dynamic. He saw that to withstand his fellow white Southerners’ dismissive incomprehension, Faulkner had had to overcultivate the resources of “pride, will power, and tough-hided indifference” (FCF 167). Faulkner remained a loner who never confided easily in others—including those he loved: his wife, his mother, his daughter, his siblings, his mistresses. Confession of any sort seems to have been torture to him: an exposure of his being. His extensive letter to the world was indirect and indirectly signed, via a lifetime of stories and novels. This virtually visceral reticence was one reason why later sessions of psychoanalysis (in New York in the 1950s) not only failed but were offensive. No one was entitled to know what was going on inside him—not that he always knew either. But this he did know: it was himself against the “sinister gods,” and they held the better cards.

Faulkner was unprepared for experience as it actually arrived. At the crucial juncture with Estelle—to elope or not to elope—he didn’t so much decide against it as found himself unable to decide for it. She seems to have been ready to take the leap. What emerges with increasing emphasis are the lineaments of the “untimely” man explored earlier—the man on whom “they stopped the war,” the man who married (too late) the woman he had failed to marry at the right time, the man who couldn’t fly a plane but pretended he could, who hadn’t seen action in the Great War but limped and lied to persuade others otherwise. He would be “a figure in the world”—the “figure” he saw when he envisaged his own identity—but “the Ones who
set up the loom” seem to have determined otherwise. Conflicting impulses, a penchant for Keatsean dream scenarios, an incapacity to accommodate emergent realities, the intransigent difficulty of writing
A Fable
(he spent a decade trying to get control over it): all these contributed, during the 1940s and early 1950s, to an acutely troubling gap between what he was and what he wanted to be.