B006JHRY9S EBOK (6 page)

One eye on the page, another on the woman it is to impress: the poems are written in the mirror of other poets’ already distinctive styles. T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock” reappears throughout the 1921
Vision in Spring
(“Let us go then; you and I, while evening grows / And a delicate violet thins the rose”). Although critics have argued that Faulkner strategically rewrites his sources, there is no denying their priority. In addition to Swinburne and Eliot (each serving different moods), A. E. Housman’s
Shropshire Lad
marks his verse recurrently: “Once he was quick and golden, / Once he was clean and brave. / Earth, you dreamed and shaped him: / Will you deny him grave?” (MF 35). In these lyrics (published later in
A Green Bough)
one hears Housman’s elegantly shortened lines, his pastoral ambiance and world-weary melancholy. Finally, the poetry of Conrad Aiken both aroused Faulkner’s generosity (rarely proffered to other living writers) and inspired his imitations. Ben Wasson recounts showing Faulkner some Aiken lines suspiciously similar to Faulkner’s own. Glancing at them, Faulkner wryly responded: “Anyhow, you’ll have to admit I showed good taste in selecting such a good man to imitate” (41).

The Marble Faun
(1924) reveals most clearly the failure of Faulkner’s poetic vocation. Failure means different things in Faulkner’s lexicon. At the high end, there is the failure that attaches to language’s intrinsic incapacity to say the real, as in “the splendid magnificent bust that [Thomas] Wolfe made in trying to put the whole history of the human heart on the head of the pin” (FIU 144). Failure at this level of aspiration was unavoidable—it involves language’s attempt to transcend its own condition as language—and Faulkner regularly assessed his own great work accordingly. I shall argue later that despite his own negative judgment (which was sincere, not posture), such work was uniquely successful. By contrast, the poems fail at the low end. Rather than seek to escape the limit imposed by words, they indulge in words, swoon over them, aspire toward a word-world elsewhere. Though
The Marble Faun
ostensibly recounts a specific time (April through June) and place, the cycle of poems establishes no location:

With half closed eyes I see

Peace and quiet liquidly

Steeping the walls and cloaking them

With warmth and silence soaking them;

They do not know, nor care to know,

Why evening waters sigh in flow;

Why about the pole star turn

Stars that flare and freeze and burn;

Nor why the seasons, springward wheeling

Set the bells of living pealing.

They sorrow not that they are dumb:

For they would not a god become. (MF 48)

“Half closed eyes”: the entire cycle circulates around landscapes “liquidly” glimpsed in the mind’s eye, not vividly delineated for the reader. The insistent end-rhymed lines, the vaguely allegorical “peace and quiet,” the generic stars and seasons and bells: there are no specifying hooks in this language, no detail that pins the words down and lets them deliver a nonverbal experience. Its aim is to anesthetize—a “cocktail of words” that functions all too often (as in Gail Hightower’s reverie in
Light in August)
as “fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees … like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand” (LA 634).

True for everything but that closing couplet, its last line the most provocative in the entire poem cycle. What ordeal do we alone undergo in the scene of natural space and time—undergo because only we seek, but cannot attain, god-status? How do space and time themselves shape the prison that we inhabit from birth to death? What limiting conditions do they impose on our desire for completeness, conditions that only a god could transcend? Faulkner hardly knew in the early 1920s how to answer these questions. The melancholy of the immovable faun testifies to the failure of a “word-world” to supply completeness to the human creature painfully caught up in real space and time. The experience of loss is the scandalous human lot, Faulkner would come to realize. The cheat of words—including those that make up most of his poetry—involved pretending to repair or transcend this loss. He would later develop a comprehensive term for all attempts to evade the loss of being that comes with life in ongoing time:
sanctuary
. To Jean Stein he said in 1955, “There is no such thing as
was
—only
is
. If
was
existed there would be no grief or sorrow” (LG 255). Long before 1955—in
The Sound and the Fury
(1929)—he was to articulate the explosion of life in moment-by-moment time. There would be no more “fine galloping” words that served as a fantasy word-world of escape from the unpreparedness and
fleetingness of here and now. Rather, he would bend language downward, toward the earth, until it shed all pretence of plot, teetered on incoherence. He would strip language of its illusory orderliness, twisting it until it conveyed the grief and sorrow of
is
—the specific moment exploding in its defenseless exposure, flaring incandescently before disappearing into the nothingness of
was
.

Such, in 1929—after the breakthrough of
The Sound and the Fury
—might have appeared the poetry he had been writing for the past two decades. What about the prose? Had Sherwood Anderson’s endorsement persuaded Liveright to publish work not otherwise compelling? He remembered Anderson’s warning: “You’ve got too much talent. You can do it too easy, in too many different ways. If you’re not careful, you’ll never write anything” (ESPL 7). Too much talent might do him in: what did that mean? He had written a lot of fiction since Anderson said those words. Did it all fall under the rubric of “never write anything”? Had his linguistic facility itself—the ease with which he generated plot and character and setting and mood—allowed him to remain on the surface, doing it “too easy, in too many different ways”? Without Anderson and the bohemian ambiance of New Orleans, he might never have turned seriously to prose at all. Before Anderson, there were a few unpublished stories. But after Anderson—thanks to that fabulous New Orleans spring of 1925, drinking and talking and carousing and writing—he had become a writer of fiction. It began as sketches published in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, and continued as the drafting of
Soldiers’ Pay
. By the time he left the city for Europe, six months after his arrival, his writerly identity had begun to crystallize. A first novel with Anderson’s imprimatur was awaiting Liveright’s approval, and the elements of a second novel were coiling inside his mind—one that would do mocking justice to the pretensions of New Orleans bohemian life.

The New Orleans sketches had launched him, and looking back on them, he could still savor their feisty energy. Week after week he would turn out portraits of the underworld he had begun to frequent—gamblers, beggars, immigrants, bootleggers, criminals, backwoodsmen, and perhaps most memorably, an idiot with “eyes clear and blue as cornflowers” and a disoriented black man who crazily sought to make his way back to Africa. Violence abounded in these sketches. What plot he used was neat and clear, slipping into knot-like focus by the end of the sketch. Further, he
was beginning to access characters whose interest exceeded his current uses, who had more to give—at some future time. All his life, moreover, he had been absorbing the vernacular expressiveness of blacks and poor whites. His remarkable capacity for silence nourished a no less remarkable capacity for listening to and remembering spoken rhythms. Finally, the “failed poet” had not so much disappeared as changed genres. The “poetry” now appeared in descriptions of brooding landscape, moments of reverie and anguish, phrases of haunting or longing. The sketches tapped and expanded his resources. They were good in themselves and even better in what they promised. They were also unfailingly picturesque. Not a one of them escaped the limitations of “Can you beat this?” Hard-boiled, droll, poetic, alienated, the voice of these sketches risked little. Did that uncommitted voice signal the trap of having “too much talent”?

He continued to write sketches and reviews for the
Times-Picayune
as he headed to Europe, and he began to think of more ambitious formats. Apart from diligent sightseeing, he was trying—off and on for several months, mainly in Paris—to write a different kind of fiction, one in which he risked more of his own interiority. The manuscript entitled
Elmer
is as strangely static, arrested, as
The Marble Faun
was—“Who marble-bound must ever be.” But Elmer lacked the costumed distance supplied by pastoral landscape. He moved in slow motion, tentatively, almost viscously. He was immured not in a scene of woods and seasons, but rather in a remembered setting of his desired mother’s body and his adored sister’s tenderness and anger, as well as his current lover’s soul-less seductiveness. A remarkable eight-page sequence involving the child Elmer’s entry (almost second by second) into a bed shared with his sister Jo-Addie concludes as follows:

His hand went out with quiet joy touching his sister’s side where it curved briefly and sharply into the mattress. It was like touching a dog, a bird dog eager to be off…. Jo neither accepted nor rejected his touch: it was as though she were somewhere else. Without moving or speaking she said That’s enough and Elmer withdrew his hand and lay relaxed and happy for sleep. Suddenly Jo moved: a breath of cold air about his shoulders told him that she had risen to her elbow.

“Ellie,” she said suddenly, putting her hand on his head, grasping a handful of his hair and shaking his head roughly, “when you want to do anything, you do it. Hear?”

“Yes, Jo. I will,” he promised without question.

She released his hair and warmth settled again about his shoulders. “Don’t you let nobody stop you,” she added.

“Yes,” repeated Elmer happily burrowing his round yellow head into the thin pillow, sleeping. (ELM 15-6)

The uncanny moment narrated here is modest, moving, and specific. It resonates with the vulnerability that would later mark the tormented brother-sister relationships of
The Sound and the Fury
. The vignette is at once inside and outside—a precisely rendered set of bodily moves in a believable bedroom, but also a hushed articulation of a child’s longing and neediness, and of his sister’s silent recognition of his plight. If, in
Elmer
, Faulkner began to explore his own pathos—no longer decked out as troubled faun or impotent Prufrock—he seems to have come to a pathway too emotionally demanding to continue. The most revealing dimension of
Elmer
may be Faulkner’s refusal—or incapacity—to complete his narration. At any rate, he abandoned
Elmer
on his return stateside in December 1925. Instead, he turned toward the swirling New Orleans materials that would culminate, several months later, as the completed typescript of
Mosquitoes
. There, as in
Soldiers’ Pay
, he could “do the hard-boiled” with the best of them. There was no need to reenter the charged emotional territory of a sensitive boy obsessed by his older sister.

Soldiers’ Pay
opens on cadet Julian Lowe, a would-be soldier whose tragedy, like Faulkner’s, is swiftly stated: “they had stopped the war on him” (SP 3). Hurtling homeward on a fast-moving train, post-Armistice, Lowe is nicely positioned for Faulkner to explore what it felt like
not
to make it to the war. Faulkner knew this feeling only too well, but could never divulge it to others and was unwilling to explore it here. Instead, Lowe’s silence gives way to the aggressive voice of Joe Gilligan, a veteran whose abusive witticisms and alcoholic consumption set the stage for the novel. The gap between combat and noncombat emerges as absolute. Gilligan has been there but will not describe it; Lowe has not been there and can never make up the deficit. Faulkner soon looks beyond Lowe, but not before having him and Gilligan usher in Margaret Powers and Donald Mahon. These two death-shadowed figures—she war-widowed and tersely wise, he war-wounded and scarred beyond recognition—carry the emotional freight of
Soldiers’ Pay
. “When am I going to get out?” (136) Mahon asks Gilligan—when will I be able to die? The unspoken answer is: not until all the betrayals that circulate around your dying have taken place, and there is nothing more for you to lose.

Soldiers’ Pay
returns obsessively to two concerns: frustrated desire, and loyalty silhouetted against betrayal. Powers and Mahon embody the book’s gesture toward a death-suffused loyalty, as though all forms of postwar life were variations on infidelity. Both characters are permanently marked by war violence; neither has, nor wants, a future. Faulkner makes their weirdly destined marriage at the end of the novel appear as simultaneously a funeral—as though, in a world of illusory colors, they share the single authentic hue: black. Powers is awkwardly imported into this plot. Placed by the writer onto that fast-moving train without prior appropriateness, she exists only to be drawn to the dying Mahon. The logic of the novel demands this pairing as a fitting sequel to her having survived her husband. As she attends to Mahon, Lowe and Gilligan paw at her, trying unsuccessfully to reach her feelings. When, at the end of the book, Gilligan presses her one last time, she responds, “Bless your heart, darling. If I married you you’d be dead in a year, Joe. All the men that marry me die, you know” (SP 245). Her utterances are oracular and absolute. A sexually alluring woman yet a deadly mate, she is also the missing mother for these war-orphaned young men. A mother, however—like Faulkner’s own?—whose impress is sinister, if not fatal. Each of the young men seeks out her embrace, yet to enter it erotically is to die. Unshakably wise, she calls the shots in this book. Or we could say that she shares that role with Donald Mahon.