B006JHRY9S EBOK (34 page)

Faulkner’s stumbling descended more broadly from a shared cultural malaise. A Southerner whose regional ideals had been decapitated ever since 1865, Faulkner dreamed backward, not forward. His dreams took the form of negative sanctuaries, holding patterns, attempted stays against the pell-mell forward movement of his life. A primary model for the domestic dignity he sought to maintain—as a bulwark against rampant, profit-driven American “progress”—was antebellum largesse. He wanted to display the valor and courage of his military progenitor—Colonel W. C. Falkner—and he wanted to inhabit the big house (Rowan Oak) built in antebellum times. Eventually, he would purchase the Bailey woods (neighboring his property) as well as Greenfield Farm. As he saw it, a Southerner was meant to be a rural (Jeffersonian) figure—one requiring an expansive mirror of land and animals to reflect his proper identity. A life of Southern graciousness should follow, enabled by a retinue of black maids and butlers, punctuated by ceremonial hunting in the big woods. As head of the household, Faulkner took on the expenses of his extended family. Such responsibilities defined the master as one who paid incumbent bills without evasion or negotiation downward.

Even as he played this role honorably, he bitterly recognized its incompatibility with his artistic calling. To Bob Haas he wrote in 1940: “Beginning at the age of 30, I, an artist, a sincere one and of the 1
^st
class, who should be free even of his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother … brother and his wife and two sons, another brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one cent of money” (SL 122). A footloose and unshaven maverick artist (beholden to no one) on the one hand, an antebellum paterfamilias (responsible for everyone) on the other: Faulkner awkwardly straddled these opposed stances. He had learned the rebellious bohemianism in Oxford during his teens, and then perfected it later in New Orleans, New
York, and abroad. He had been absorbing the requirements of noblesse oblige ever since his mother’s milk and the childhood vignettes of Old South civility and rectitude. A maverick artist without income—who is at the same time a married gentleman with costly notions of propriety—is a man under considerable stress.

He drank to forget his defections as husband, son, father, uncle, and citizen of the South—roles he both accepted and submitted to ruthless critique. Like Jason Compson and Gail Hightower laboring furiously to escape something inescapable—themselves—so Faulkner grasped (even as he refused to know) that his forays into sanctuary were doomed. “Truth is the constant thing,” he would say in a 1955 interview in Japan, “it’s what man knows is right and that when he violates it, it troubles him … and he’ll try to escape from the knowledge of that truth in all sorts of ways, in drink, drugs, various forms of anaesthesia, because he simply cannot face himself” (LG 145). “The human heart in conflict with itself,” so Faulkner declared in his Nobel Prize speech (1950), is the core concern of great literature. It was no less the conflict gnawing at his own core.

He may also have been drinking because of professional anxiety. His big book—
A Fable
—was stalled. Its snail-paced composition would menace for over a decade his sense of artistic identity. Critics have marveled at how Faulkner had conceived, by 1930, most of the materials that would flower into novels during the next three decades:
Go Down, Moses
(1942) leading to
Intruder in the Dust
(1948);
Sanctuary
(1931) followed by
Requiem for a Nun
(1951);
The Hamlet
(1940) inaugurating the Snopes trilogy—
The Town
(1957) and
The Mansion
(1959). Less often noted is that, in the 1940s and 1950s, Faulkner generated little that was genuinely
new
—except for
A Fable
(1954). It would be hard to overestimate the dreams and anxieties that accumulated for over a decade during the stop-and-start composing of this novel. Deep down, as he conceded more than once, he knew that the book—his major new departure—was in trouble. What did the difficulty getting it written mean, if not that it went obscurely against the bent of his own genius? I shall return to the strange intensity—the rhetorical insistence mounting at times to a deafening roar—of Faulkner’s work between 1948 and 1954 (
Intruder, Requiem, A Fable
). For now the point is clear. The longer this belated novel took him to write, the more it had to become his
Moby Dick
or
War and Peace.
⁵
However wistfully he spoke of its promise, it comes as no surprise that, faced with its unending unfinishedness, he took to drink.

Finally, though, the distress sending him with rising frequency to the bottle may have arisen most from emotional needs. These had been
thwarted ever since his disastrous marriage in 1929 to Estelle. “I started drinking … You know why,” he had muttered to Meta Carpenter Rebner in his Algonquin room in November 1937. Those cryptic words suggest that burn-sick and booze-sick and heart-sick were fused together in him, and that Meta serves as a key for exploring all three.

He met her in Hollywood in December 1935, one of the most fraught periods of his life. Dean’s crash had occurred just a month earlier. He was trying to complete
Absalom
, to survive guilt for his brother’s death, and to make enough Hollywood money to gain control over his debt. Meta was eleven years younger, slender, attractive, demure, and Southern. She was Howard Hawks’s script girl—as he would later, in a different sense, become Hawks’s screenplay guy—and her Mississippi provenance meant much to him. Thousands of miles from home, he missed his region—and especially his infant daughter. He felt that he had no respectable reason for being in California. It was only and always about the money. Meta’s shared background and mannerisms charmed him: a Southern oasis in the great Babylonian desert. But in a deeper sense, she offered no oasis of difference. His affair with her—though it might have happened elsewhere—took on its precise contours in Hollywood. Hollywood
existed
as the timeless, placeless stage set for launching the heart’s longings and liabilities. No less, the relationship with Meta was doomed because it happened in Hollywood.

“A loving gentleman,” she called him in the title of her 1976 memoir, written fourteen years after his death, almost twenty-five after they had last seen each other. The title is both sentimental and accurate. “Miss Meta,” “m’ honey,” “dear one,” “ma’am”: these were the courtly, distancing terms he used for addressing her. Though mannered, they exude his delight in her presence, his Southern appreciation of this charming woman. His respect for her never failed—she responded to it from the beginning—and it was in keeping with his need to idealize her as a woman on a pedestal, his young maiden. “The idealization of me as a girl far too young for him was to last for a number of years,” she wrote. “I never protested, and my acceptance of his vision of me as a maiden nourished his fantasy” (ALG 78). As though she were Estelle as Estelle had been meant to be, Meta opened up, for him, a hermetic space of fulfillment at once erotic and sublime.

Her bared body aroused him; at the same time he wanted to know only certain things about that body. At their first dinner together (after
his assiduous courtship that December in 1935) she noted how repelled he was by nearby diners consuming their meal. “There’s something about human mastication that’s downright unattractive” (ALG 35), he explained to her. As the courtship developed into an affair during the early months of 1936, and their physical intimacy deepened, his squeamishness about the body’s basic functions struck her more forcefully. He would run water in the bathroom to muffle the sound whenever he urinated or defecated and she was nearby—a delicacy that touched and amused her. It also strengthened her awareness that he was sequestering the two of them into a rarefied love-space that had room for little else. Others were not to enter. “Bill had placed me in a bubble,” she wrote, “and we were using up the air in it; one day we would not be able to breathe” (67). But in his mind, where would ideal lovers live, if not in a Keatsean world of bliss beyond the mundane needs of eating and breathing and socializing? He was a troubadour courting his lady; she was to be his alone.

Six years earlier, his world had come crashing down when a married and possessed Estelle had been superposed on an earlier and unpossessed Estelle. The two images were radically incompatible, and the later one did not so much annihilate the earlier one as exile it to a space in his mind where it would remain compelling and unrealizable. Their 1929 honeymoon was in many respects a disaster; by 1933 they might not have been sleeping together any longer. At least he told Meta that after Estelle’s difficult delivery of Jill that year—followed by months of unstable health—Estelle had shown no interest in intercourse. With Meta, for the only time in his life, he would enjoy a coalescence of the ideal and the actual. If his language of courtship suggested the need to maintain distance, it no less expressed his amazement that this lovely woman could be his.

Soon he was drawing (doodling would be closer to it) erotic, cartoonlike figures of their intercourse, and he was writing her tenderly obscene phrases and poems of sexual gratitude. “Meta/Bill/Meta/who soft keeps for him her love’s long girl’s body sweet to fuck Bill” (ALG 75). Showing her his unexpurgated copy of Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, he developed for the two of them a kindred erotic lexicon: not
Chatterley’s
“John Thomas” and “Lady Jane” for their intimate parts, but “Mr. Bowen” and “Mrs. Bowen.” His correspondence with her delighted in these terms; the phrase-maker was Faulkner, not Meta. In another letter he wrote in the same vein, “For Meta, my heart, my jasmine garden, my April and May cunt; my white one, my blonde morning, winged, my sweetly dividing, my honey-cloyed, my sweet-assed gal. Bill” (76). “Keeps for him,” as well as that
string of “my”’s: such terms intimate less a couple’s shared richness than his astonishment at possessing her: all this is
his
. With Meta, during the passionate early months of 1936, he enjoyed the honeymoon (“honey-cloyed”) that had failed with Estelle six years earlier. A photo she took reveals a grinning Faulkner seated in the courtyard of her Hollywood apartment complex—grinning in appreciation of his fabulous luck. This photo joins that other one of him grinning, his hand pointing proudly to his Waco, taken a few years earlier. I know of no others of Faulkner that approach these two as unguarded expressions of delight. In each, he expresses his joy in possessing something he had assumed to be beyond his reach. The “sinister gods” must have been napping: this was too good to be true.

If he treated her as a maiden whom life had miraculously made available to him, she saw him as a lover at once strong, fatherly, and reliable. For their first few months together, she had no idea he drank heavily. When her friends told her of his reputation, she was shocked—though she would soon enough see him inebriated. At any rate, these first months of passion were the crucible in which they forged their bond together. “I was the girl he would surely have married,” she wrote, “if our paths had only crossed before 1929” (ALG 24). In her mind this was never an affair. She was not a promiscuous woman, nor—she thought—was he a promiscuous man. (“Sensualist, yes…. Womanizer not at all” [127].) A Southern girl brought up to be docile in the presence of men—and to charm them with her pliancy—Meta did not threaten Faulkner. When she sought to learn more about his inner life, she soon learned it would not be forthcoming. Even his intimately obscene phrases and poems emerged as written documents, arising in absence and communicating safely across it. She came to recognize that she learned more about him from his letters than ever in their conversations. He was, and would remain, a “moated man,” “a great carapace,” one who drew his “insularity … over himself like a second, tougher skin” (50). She was not to know until after his death that he had not fought and been wounded in the Great War. From first to last she responded to him as the famous William Faulkner. His stature acted as a screen that both brought them together and separated her from the precincts of his intimate thoughts. Which is probably how he wanted it to be.

That summer of 1936 he returned home, and when he came back to Hollywood he had bad news. Divorce—he had done some research—would be difficult, if not impossible. He could not lose Jill, and he had been counseled that divorcing Estelle would mean losing his daughter. There was more bad news. Estelle and Jill were coming out to Hollywood. That Faulkner wanted
Meta to meet his infant daughter is understandable; that he insisted as well on her meeting Estelle is less so. His affair brought out a new streak in him—at once detached and sadistic—as he schemed how to bring his two women together. He arrived at the bizarre scenario of drafting his friend Ben Wasson (working in Hollywood as well) into the performance. Wasson and Meta—Ben’s supposed date—would join the Faulkners for dinner together in the Faulkners’ rooms. Meta immediately recoiled, but he was adamant. It was an awful evening; apparently only Faulkner enjoyed the charade. Estelle drank heavily, chattered intensely, then called Wasson the next morning in fury. She had not been fooled. Wasson remembered Faulkner’s saying shortly thereafter, “Aint there something you can do to get her off my back? Get her a lover, anything, so she’ll leave me alone” (CNC 148). The phrasing is cruel, conveying both the besottedness of a lover who has glimpsed his escape and the vindictiveness of a husband who has paid too dearly. As for Meta, she came away from this dinner, as well as from later masquerade-encounters with Estelle, convinced of the wife’s shrillness and inadequacy. “Let him go, Estelle,” she thought. “I can grow with him. You can’t. I’m younger. Prettier. I can hold him, grace his life, keep him from alcohol, slake his passion, calm his volcanic rages” (ALG 180). Could she possibly have managed all of this? Did she glimpse, even then, that she’d never have the chance to try?