B006JHRY9S EBOK (45 page)

Authors: Philip Weinstein

BOOK: B006JHRY9S EBOK

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3.
“There was not even an employment contract for Murry under the terms of the sale. Not only had his father arbitrarily stripped Murry of his profession, but he also substituted in its stead the operation of a much less prestigious means of
transportation, a livery stable. Overnight he demoted his son from the twentieth century to the nineteenth”
(Faulkner and Love
, 172).

4.
Much of this paragraph’s argument—as well as my orientation in the two previous paragraphs—is indebted to Sensibar’s earlier, provocative reading of the Falkner family history as a narrative of paternal wounds inflicted on, and then recycled by, the sons, once they become fathers in their own right (OFA). Sensibar is equally sensitive to forms of racial and gender abuse wrought into this family history. John Irwin’s
Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge
posits both
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!
as obsessively returning to and reconfiguring a Freudian drama of abusive fathers and injured sons, of inflicted wounds that repeat and replay rather than heal. Though Irwin has little interest in Faulkner’s life, his reading of the work uncannily echoes patterns found in the family’s troubled history.

5.
There is both internal and external evidence suggesting that Faulkner knew Joyce’s book well. His library contains a 1924 copy of
Ulysses
, with his name on it; Stone claimed to have given it to him as “something new…something you should know about” (F2 1:352).

CHAPTER 2

1.
Sensibar’s revisionist account of the Faulkner-Estelle relationship considers this elopement crisis to be no crisis at all. Speaking of them both as “adolescents” trying to figure themselves out—though each was already twenty years old in 1918—Sensibar claims that, for his part, Faulkner “did not need or want a wife”
(Faulkner and Love
, 320). She provides no evidence for this claim other than the insouciance that appears in Faulkner’s letters to his parents written later that year from New Haven and Toronto. Faulkner’s published letters, however—as is widely known—virtually never reveal his more troubling thoughts or feelings. As for Estelle, Sensibar understands her agreeing to marry Franklin in 1918 as something sinister imposed on her. Lem Oldham and Cornell Franklin—Estelle’s father and fiancé—pressured her to consent to this union, Sensibar argues, because they both saw it in their interest for her to do so. On this reading Estelle is a pawn caught up in a marriage “market” (Sensibar’s emphatic and repeated term) controlled by males. Estelle accordingly succumbs because of a complex mix of daughterly obedience, guilt over the loss of her own younger brother (whom she would “replace” with the child she hoped soon to conceive), and anger that Faulkner had already deserted her, years ago, for the attentions of Phil Stone. None of this is implausible, but no less, none of it is supported by more than speculation and indirect circumstantial evidence. In my reading—which of course I cannot prove either, but for which I offer the evidence available (Blotner, after all, did a good deal of homework)—their failed elopement was indeed a crisis, with reverberations for Faulkner’s life and art that would endure indefinitely.

2.
Susan Snell,
Phil Stone of Oxford: A Vicarious Life
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 77. My interpretation of Stone’s likely social resonance for Faulkner is indebted to the opening chapters of this study.

3.
Snell, 140.

4.
As the references embedded in this and the next two paragraphs suggest, my argument is here indebted to James G. Watson’s astute reading of the strategic dimension lodged in Faulkner’s intricate negotiation of photos of himself. See his
William Faulkner: Self-presentation and Performance
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 35, for the passage cited.

5.
André Bleikasten reads Faulkner’s sustained fictionalizing of his own life as follows: “c’était bien un simulateur, il aimait tricher. Mais tricher, ce n’est pas seulement tromper, c’est aussi corriger le hazard…. Tout au long de sa vie, Faulkner s’employa à corriger le hazard, à dissimuler les défauts. Il rusait avec la vérité, la contournait, la détournait, en inventait d’autres. Il mentait pour mieux respirer”
(William Faulkner: Une vie en romans
[Paris: Editions Aden, 2007], 103).

6.
Faulkner used this phrase in one of the interviews he gave in Japan in 1956. Speaking of his phenomenal creativity between 1929 and 1936, he said: “there’s a time in his life, one matchless time, when…[the speed and the talent are] matched completely” (LG 149). Jay Parini took the phrase as the title of his 2004 biography of Faulkner.

7.
Blotner puts it thus: “Meanwhile, almost unbidden, the staff [Uncle Ned and Mammy Callie] was beginning to gather…. There was no money for salaries…but he was responsible for their food, shelter, clothing, health care, and pay when he could afford it. That he should do this was exactly what Mammy Callie and Uncle Ned expected” (F261-2).

8.
Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers
, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna K. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978), 7 vols, 1:450.

9.
See Bleikasten: “L’une des très rares photos à nous faire voir un Faulkner heureux est celle qui le montre, en chemise et pantalon de lin blanc, la cravate négligemmant glissée entre deux boutons de sa chemise, souriant, radieux, devant son Waco” (364).

CHAPTER 3

1.
C. Vann Woodward,
The Burden of Southern History
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), 8.

2.
Judith Sensibar explores at length the premise that, thanks to Faulkner’s extensive childhood exposure to Mammy Callie and her world, he would have registered—deeply and disturbingly—both the emotional realities of Callie’s world and the white-mandated ordering system that feared, mangled, and repressed those realities. “Callie Barr taught him uncolored love,” Sensibar claims; “from her he learned the courage to plumb the terrible psychic and cultural consequences of denying and being ashamed of that love”
(Faulkner and Love
, 20).

3.
However attentive to data that previous historians and biographers overlooked, Williamson’s narrative reconstruction remains speculative. With respect to one claim—the age of Emeline Falkner, the mulatto woman who entered the Colonel’s household in 1858—it may even be self-contradictory. The 1860 census
gives this mulatto woman’s age as twenty-seven, which would make 1833 her birth year. But the birth year engraved on her tombstone in the Ripley Cemetery, as Williamson himself labored to identify (by rubbing hard at the at-first-indecipherable stone) is 1837. Are two different women involved, or is there an error in the data? In support of the latter idea, the census information may have been mistaken, or it may have been mistakenly reported. Alternatively, the tombstone date might be erroneous. Finally, as Williamson makes clear, the writing on Emeline’s tombstone was at first illegible and (as is corroborated by others who have seen Williamson’s evidence) its carved dates are still—despite his rubbing—difficult to decipher with certainty. The larger argument loses nothing of its resonance, but some of its factual underpinnings seem insusceptible (at this point in history) to definitive proof or disproof.

4.
“Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” cited in Grace Elizabeth Hale and Robert Jackson, “We’re Trying Hard as Hell to Free Ourselves,” in
A Companion to William Faulkner
, ed. Richard C. Moreland (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 43.

5.
What Else but Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 12.

6.
See the entire essay, Hale and Jackson, “We’re Trying Hard as Hell to Free Ourselves,” 28-45.

7.
Cited in Arthur Kinney,
Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time
(New York: Twayne, 1996), xix.

8.
James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” in
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 88.

9.
I explore the South’s interracial “love story” only insofar as Faulkner’s greatest novels reveal the suppressed white longing for passage across the race-barrier, even as they continue to register such crossing as a taboo to be maintained at all costs, including murder. Such experience is more broadly fraught, however. The impress of black mammies on the countless white children they suckled and nourished—an unavoidably shaping force regardless of the forms of denial mandated by racist ideology—lies at the heart of a larger psychic disfigurement from which the South has still to recover. Lillian Smith’s
Killers of the Dream
focuses powerfully on the causes and fallout of this disfigurement. Among Faulkner’s critics, Eric Sundquist, Richard Godden, and Judith Sensibar have dealt extensively, though in quite different ways, with the psychic scars imposed by Southern racist arrangements. See Sundquist’s
Faulkner: The House Divided
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), Godden’s
Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Revolution
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Sensibar’s
Faulkner and Love.

CHAPTER 4

1.
Tom Dardis, in
The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), devotes some seventy pages to arguing otherwise. Focusing on the alcoholism of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and O’Neill, Dardis maintains that neither moralizing nor psychologizing is pertinent:
“Most alcoholics do not drink because they’re emotionally ill to begin with. They drink because they’re alcoholics” (13). Dardis provides information about Faulkner’s history of drinking but offers no explanatory frame for making sense of it other than chemically.

2.
See Dardis’s account (citing Herbert Asbury,
The Great Illusion: An Informal Account of Prohibition):
“Probably the worst drink that appeared during Prohibition was fluid extract of Jamaica ginger, popularly known as Jake, which was about 90 percent alcohol…. As far as is known, nobody died from drinking it, but even small quantities nearly always caused a terrible form of paralysis” (41).

3.
Dardis,
Thirsty Muse
, 93.

4.
Sensibar reads the cause of Faulkner’s drinking more narrowly as the narcotic he drew on his entire adolescent and adult life, in order to manage the deliberate—and indirectly suicidal—rejection of the black maternal (Mammy Callie) that Southern culture demanded of its white males. Drink, she claims, served for Faulkner “as an anodyne for unbearable loss that cannot be mourned”
(Faulkner and Love
, 3).

5.
Faulkner to Bob Haas (June 1946): “I believe I see a rosy future for this book, I mean it may sell, it will be a War and Peace close enough to home, our times, language, for Americans to really buy it” (SL 238).

6.
This is not the more famous film entitled
Battle Cry
(starring Aldo Ray) that appeared several years later.

7.
Hugh Kenner makes this claim in
A Homemade World
(New York: Knopf, 1976), 205-6.

INDEX

Note: page numbers in italics indicate sustained discussion of novels

Absalom, Absalom!
, 1, 4, 9, 13, 17, 19, 34, 42, 46–7, 52, 68, 90, 94, 107, 114, 124, 127, 145–55, 157, 165, 167, 193, 205, 210–1, 212–3, 225, 228, 239n.1