B006JHRY9S EBOK (4 page)

I’m inclined to think that … maybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass in experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things—that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.

—Faulkner in the University

Faulkner had probably just returned from the annual deer hunt at General Stone’s lodge, thirty miles west of Oxford, Mississippi, on the edge of the Delta. He was two months past his thirtieth birthday and had reason to be feeling good. Thanks to Phil Stone’s friendship over the years, he had grown accustomed to spending time with the larger Stone family—wealthy, privileged, and planterly, as Faulkner’s family was not. One of the pleasures of this connection was the renewed hunting it afforded. He may even have remembered Phil’s telling of his first bear—a vignette so vivid that it was as though it had happened to Faulkner too. Just fifteen years old, Phil had seen the bear, stood his ground, fired, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the bear was sprawled out before him, dead. The other hunters put Phil through the ritual “blooding” that attends a boy’s first kill. They smeared his face with the bear’s blood, initiating him into the yearly hunting of wild creatures, in the company of men. Throughout his life, Faulkner would find ways to reenact the ceremony of hunting in the big woods, in the company of men. It confirmed—graciously, wordlessly—his sense of himself. So as he was returning home that last day of November 1927, he was no doubt in an expansive mood. When he came upon the unopened letter from Horace Liveright—of Boni & Liveright Press, the man who had published him twice in the past two years—his mood might have brightened further. He knew that this latest novel,
Flags in the Dust
, was far and away his best. As he had written Liveright six weeks earlier,
when mailing in the typescript, “At last and certainly, I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals. I believe it is the damdest best book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher” (F 204).

Opening Liveright’s letter, he read:

It is with sorrow in my heart that I write to tell you that three of us have read
Flags in the Dust
and don’t believe that Boni & Liveright should publish it. Furthermore, as a firm deeply interested in your work, we don’t believe that you should offer it for publication….
Soldiers’ Pay
was a very fine book and should have done better. Then
Mosquitoes
wasn’t quite as good, showed little development in your spiritual growth and I think none in your art of writing. Now comes
Flags in the Dust
and we’re frankly very much disappointed by it…. The story really doesn’t get anywhere and has a thousand loose ends. If the book had plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be any use. My chief objection is that you don’t seem to have any story to tell and I contend that a novel should tell a story. (F 560)

He was stunned. The new book had broached for the first time the teeming materials of family and region—of the South as he had unthinkingly absorbed it, never knowing he could write it too. Yet Liveright saw
Flags
as a dead end, so dead that showing it to other publishers could damage his career before it had really begun. Faulkner responded jauntily—“It’s too bad you don’t like
Flags in the Dust,”
and later: “I think now that I’ll sell my typewriter and go to work—though God knows, it’s sacrilege to waste that talent for idleness which I possess.” Beneath the insouciant pose he was disoriented, stopped in his tracks. During the months that followed, he sought to revise
Flags
on his own, getting nowhere. To his great-aunt Alabama he wrote, “Every day or so I burn some of it up and rewrite it, and at present it is almost incoherent.” Two years later, he still remembered the wound vividly:

I was shocked: my first emotion was blind protest, then I became objective for an instant, like a parent who is told that its child is a thief or an idiot or a leper; for a dreadful moment I contemplated it with consternation and despair, then like the parent I hid my own eyes in the fury of denial.” (all quotes in F 206)

“Child,” “parent,” “idiot,” “fury”: these terms suggestively bring to mind the breakthrough novel—
The Sound and the Fury
—that he would write in the months following Liveright’s assault on
Flags
. But in November 1927,
he had nothing new to show as counter-evidence. Worse, the big things published up to then—the volume of poetry, the two apprentice novels—were beginning to appear in an unsettling light.

That trio of successes, looked back on, revealed liabilities he may have suspected, but which had appeared minor so long as the acceptances kept coming in. (As he was to write years later, in
Absalom, Absalom!
“He seemed to kind of dissolve and a part of him turn and rush back through the two years … like when you pass through a room fast and look at all the objects in it and you turn and go back through the room again and look at all the objects from the other side and you find out you had never seen them before, rushing back through those two years and seeing a dozen things that had happened and he hadn’t even seen them before.”) He had been writing poetry ever since he could remember, but the poems had attracted little attention—published (apart from
The Marble Faun
[1924]) maybe in the University of Mississippi’s literary journal, or hand-bound and offered to a friend or sweetheart. If he looked at it squarely, even
The Marble Faun
seemed to lose its status as counter-evidence. Had Phil Stone not generously supplied $400 to meet production costs, the Four Seasons Press of Boston would not have published it, knowing—as Faulkner may also have known in the back of his mind—that sales would never match their outlay.

If Phil Stone made that first publication possible, it didn’t take a lot of guesswork to identify who made the next two possible. The connection with Sherwood Anderson—meeting him in New Orleans in late 1924 after having become friends with his wife-to-be three years earlier in New York—had been a rare stroke of luck. Faulkner would later take sardonic pleasure in repeating Mrs. Anderson’s remark “that … if he [Anderson] don’t have to read it
[Soldiers’ Pay]
, he will tell his publisher to take it” (F 146). Amusing to remember later, but less so if recalled in November 1927. The terms of the deal—Anderson’s telling the publisher to sign the book—might now have suggested a different portent. Sherwood Anderson was a celebrated writer who could, and did, dictate terms to Liveright. Thanks to the bestseller success of
Winesburg, Ohio
, Anderson was currently enjoying a huge advance from Liveright on his next novel (which became
Dark Laughter)
. In his contract, Liveright had urged Anderson to be on the lookout for new talent. What Anderson wanted, Anderson was likely to get. Was
Soldiers’ Pay
in print mainly because the great man, who hadn’t even read it, had given his imprimatur? Take away Phil Stone and Sherwood Anderson, and where was William Faulkner?

The fragility of his position increased the more he probed it. When Liveright gave
Soldiers’ Pay
(1926) the green light, what was he actually endorsing? Did he glimpse its awkward lyricism? Or did he envisage, more pragmatically, a salable variation on “the war story,” such as what Dos Passos
(Three Soldiers)
and Cummings
(The Enormous Room)
had already cashed in on a few years earlier? More, did he now view it, in late 1927, as an apprentice piece of work still in search of itself, if silhouetted against Hemingway’s masterly
The Sun Also Rises
(also 1926)? Yet another nihilistic report from a casualty of World War I, another testimonial from the Lost Generation? (“A fitting complement and wind-up to the literature of the War,” Richard Hughes would write of it in 1930—
Soldiers’ Pay
as a novel nicely finding its niche within a familiar genre of 1920s fiction [CH 60].) If this were so, Faulkner’s unease might have deepened because he knew—as neither Liveright nor anyone else knew—that he was a specious reporter of that war, a self-proclaimed veteran who had actually never seen military action. If Faulkner explored his discomfort further, the thoughts became darker. What about
Mosquitoes?
Did Liveright give it a green light mainly because it was fashionably alienated, disaffected, superior to the New Orleans antics it acidly narrated? A publisher like Liveright, committed to shocking bourgeois complacency and to supporting the most abrasive modernist texts, might have seen in the freewheeling corrosiveness of
Mosquitoes
plenty to applaud, even though he had his reservations. Finally, what did it mean that the novel in which Faulkner had most revealed his talent
—Flags in the Dust
—struck Liveright as a mirror in which nothing of interest could be seen? Did Faulkner himself intimate such a disparaging assessment of his first two novels when he proposed to Liveright to “bang … out a book to suit you—though it’ll never be one as youngly glamorous as ‘Soldiers’ Pay’ nor as trashily smart as ‘Mosquitoes’” (F 206)?

Worse, he owed Liveright money, the $200 advance on
Flags
—a lot of money in 1927. How could he pay that off? Would Liveright bind him further by refusing to return the typescript of
Flags
until he had replaced it with something else—something that Liveright might not care for either? Not for the first time, Faulkner sought to erase debt by placing his short stories in one of the popular national magazines, and not for the first time, struck out. None was accepted in 1928. Thirty years old, he had been writing poetry, and then fiction, for over half his life, yet his professional identity was suddenly more in question than it had ever been. Just hitting his artistic stride, he had been grounded at the very moment his wings were unfolding. And that was only to speak professionally. Emotionally, he had—without
planning it, yet without avoiding it either—entered an area of even greater turmoil.

Not that he was in the habit of explaining things, but even if he were, he could not explain this. Not to himself, much less to others. Estelle Oldham was poised to become his again. She had been his childhood playmate and then his sweetheart for over a decade. She had wanted to elope with him, they had failed to bring it off, and she had gone on to marry another man. Now, all but extricated from that marriage, she would soon be free to become his wife. This approaching event looked like a dream about to come true. Was that the problem—that dreams don’t come true, shouldn’t come true? On perhaps the worst day of his life—April 18, 1918—she had disappeared from him, a Eurydice descending into darkness, marrying Cornell Franklin and heading for an exotic world in which he had no part. As that fateful day in April had approached, his distress had mounted unbearably, and he had fled. He put over a thousand miles between them, visiting Phil Stone at Yale and working at a munitions factory in New Haven. He was plotting to enter the Great War before it ended. Even so, the distance had failed to calm his heart. It had not kept him from seeing the wedding service inexorably taking place, from hearing the church bells confirming it. None of this could be undone. Yet it was being undone even as he pondered it. Her marriage had failed, and she was going to be his again, soon, sooner than he wanted.

Estelle had returned to Oxford shortly after her wedding and recurrently thereafter, bearing incontrovertible evidence of its reality—first her daughter, Victoria, born in 1919, and four years later her son, Malcolm. Faulkner had continued to write poetry for her, visiting with her often at her parents’ home, incoherently straddling the gap between an intimacy unbroken and an intimacy ruptured. Her married life in Honolulu was exotic—a world of wealth and elegant clothes, of dances and garden parties, like nothing he knew or desired. Still, her unpossessed image continued to stir him into poetry, spurring an outburst of poems during her 1919 visit, then even more at the time of her 1921 visit. In a volume of Swinburne he gave her, she found an inscription so passionate that she had to tear it out of the book before returning to her husband in Honolulu. He could not extricate himself from her spell.

Change or die, he often told himself. Though still in love with Estelle, he had survived her abandoning him by changing. By 1927, he had become a published poet and novelist, a denizen of the New Orleans literary world, a traveler to Europe. He had also taken up more dubious roles: local dandy, barefoot and shaggy vagabond, criminal bootlegger, bohemian
extraordinaire. None of these roles accommodated a spouse. None involved income producing, home owning, tax paying, child raising, wife sustaining. How could he help but recognize that he had become, during her decade of marriage, a bachelor again, on the voyage out, his horizons expanding? Half a dozen future novels clamored inside him, their opening premises already sketched on paper or circulating in his head. Estelle had inflicted on him his most grievous wound, but she belonged more to a past he had somehow survived and left behind than to a future in which he could see himself flourishing.

Yet she seemed inextricably part of his present those last days in November 1927. Almost three years earlier, her marriage with Cornell Franklin had apparently reached a state of crisis. She and her husband both spoke of wanting out. Since divorce could be granted in Mississippi only on grounds of adultery, they agreed that—if it came to that—they would seek divorce in Shanghai (where they had been living since 1923). They had consented to a sort of probationary separation for six months—he in Shanghai, she in Honolulu—to see if the bond could be salvaged. As that period came to an end, they both knew that the marriage was beyond saving. It seems that Franklin, rather than Estelle, actually initiated the divorce proceedings in Shanghai, in the U.S. Court for China, on November 13, 1928. He was eager to remarry, and if Estelle had done the filing, she would have had to prove two years of prior residence in Shanghai—a requirement that her extensive returns to Oxford during that time made it impossible to fulfill. (Indeed, Franklin’s official motive for divorce was his wife’s “desertion.”) By February 15, 1929, the divorce was finalized, although the divorce decree reached the Oxford courthouse only on June 6, 1929. The conditions Franklin imposed were severe: he would provide $300/month for the support of his two children, but no alimony for her. By then Estelle wanted out so badly that she did not contest these conditions.
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