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  Faulkner’s Early Prose

  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 Before Anderson, there were a few unpublished stories.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.

  “When Am I Going to Get Out?”: Soldiers’ Pay

  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 woma
n 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.

  Mahon seems mutely to harbor Faulkner’s own longings. His wound anneals him from all possibility of intimacy, both orphaning him and constituting an impenetrable sanctuary sorely unavailable to his creator. “The man that was wounded is dead,” Powers says, “and this is another one: a grown child. It’s his apathy, his detachment from everything that’s so terrible” (SP 92). Though his former fiancée, Cecily, continues to betray him, Mahon has reached a position of final indifference. It is as though Faulkner bestowed on him both the war wound he never received and the love wound he would never recover from. Mahon is at ease with both these wounds, finally safe behind his scar. He appears as a figure through whom the writer fantasized the immunity that death brings to the dying. Perhaps this is why Soldiers’ Pay reads like a burial ceremony—a roundabout means of getting the damaged Mahon properly dead and into the earth.

  Surrounding Mahon’s ceremonial descent into death are a choir-like set of antic figures—inconstant Cecily Saunders and her stop-and-start flirtations, drunken George Farr and his frustrated lust for Cecily, goat-like Januarius Jones and his freewheeling predations on whatever female will submit to them. Faulkner makes none of these minor figures interesting. They seem to inhabit a different universe from that of Powers and Mahon. Soldiers’ Pay fails to interrelate its cast of characters persuasively, as though there remain ghostly unwritten materials behind the palpably written ones. The writer’s energy—balked from release in either plot or character (Mahon is an unplumbable center, and Powers does not develop)—finds its outlet in gorgeous, overwritten settings: “Beyond the oaks against a wall poplars in restless formal row were columns of a Greek temple, yet the poplars themselves in slim vague green were poised and vain as girls in a frieze. Against a privet hedge would be lilies soon like nuns in a cloister and blue hyacinths swung soundless bells, dreaming of Lesbos” (SP 46). Yet another cocktail of words, poetic phrases doing duty for an ordeal of the spirit that Faulkner does not know how to narrate. No one in or outside the novel cares about the poplars or the privet hedge, the lilies or the blue hyacinths. “When am I going to get out?” the dying Donald Mahon murmured. Behind that question lies another this novel does not pose: when are we going to get in? When will we be enabled, by the writer’s experimental language, to encounter not Mahon’s deathly immunity but the living anguish inside his wounded mind and body? Soldiers’ Pay dances around the surface of this question. Mosquitoes, stuffed to the gills with its own artistic and erotic questions, never even takes it up.

  “It’s Like Morphine, Language Is”: Mosquitoes

  Mosquitoes moves with a narrative assurance lacking in Soldiers’ Pay, and Faulkner must have known at least one of the reasons why. He had actually experienced its main events. If the war in Soldiers’ Pay imposed a wounding he elaborately faked, the mosquitoes in Mosquitoes inflicted a kind of sting—bodily, but also verbal, sexual, artistic—he knew only too well. In 1925 he had been aboard an abortive cruise on New Orleans’s Lake Pontchartrain. Rain assailed the party, the yacht’s motor gave out, and they were unable to move. Hordes of mosquitoes descended on them. The same event, reconfigured, gives Mosquitoes its plot. More broadly, Faulkner was sorting out his New Orleans experience—what he had come to know of its artistic and intellectual pretensions—into a ship of fools. Each character is reduced to essential traits—the loquacious writer Fairchild, the idealistic sculptor Gordon, the sexually engorged Jenny, the lean and epicene Patricia, the gnomic semitic man, and so on. Like epithets in eighteenth-century poetry, their leading traits serve as straitjackets. No one can change in this novel (the phrase “the semitic man” accompanies Julius Wiseman like a mantra, endlessly repeated, never varied). The central figure in this cast of characters is the hapless Mr. Talliaferro, who “often mused with regret on the degree of intimacy he might have established with his artistic acquaintances had he but acquired the habit of masturbation in his youth” (MOS 161). This piece of “information” is provided on the novel’s opening page. It refers to a sexual activity never elsewhere named in Faulkner’s novels, never elsewhere pertinent to their concerns. It is as though the writer were saying, abandon spiritual striving, all you who enter here!

  Although Faulkner insinuates his name once into this novel—as “a little kind of black man” (MOS 371) whom Jenny met once and considered crazy—he stays out of Mosquitoes. The consequences are considerable, for his willingness to pass judgment correlates with his distance from his materials. Faulkner would never again be so imaginatively indifferent, so insistently mocking. The shameless self-display of artistic convictions, the nonstop aesthetic and cultural manifestoes that he encountered among Anderson’s New Orleans coterie: for a man who treasured silence, these were not only sterile but offensive. “Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless” (408). Faulkner’s later often-stated conviction—those who can, do, while those who can’t, write—might have dated from the heady logorrhea of New Orleans literary life.

  On the boat, an endless stream of pontification, punctuated for the males by steady drinking (heading toward stupor), and for the females by aimless chatter and flirtation. Off the boat, no better. When Pat and David romantically jump ship in order to elope, Faulkner subjects them to a fate crueler than on-board boredom. Bombarded by mosquitoes, lost in a swamp, brutalized by the penetrating summer sun, their romance fizzles. They almost die of exposure. Their rescue is as unchivalric as that Temple Drake receives two years later in Sanctuary. A sweat-stained local appears, glares at them, spits near their feet: “You folks been wandering around in the swamp all day? What you want to go back fer, now? Feller got enough, huh?” He spits again, “Aint no such thing as enough. Git a real man next time” (MOS 431). If Faulkner was thinking of his own failed elopement with Estelle, he granted no reprieve in this sordid replay. The novel reads more broadly as a refusal of all reprieve. There is no escaping the itch and scratch of desire stimulated and frustrated, of art contemplated but not created, of ceaseless talk that goes nowhere. “It’s like morphine, language is” (516).

  Only the aloof and silent sculptor, Gordon, operates above this infecting realm of talk and tease. Faulkner opens the book inside Gordon’s studio, letting us see the real thing that the others’ verbal antics merely play at: “it was marble … motionless and passionately eternal—the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless armless legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape” (MOS 263). Such lyrical language appears in Mosquitoes only one other time. Seeing in Pat an intolerable embodiment of the wrought torso that obsesses him, Gordon suddenly swings her into the air: “and for an instant she stopped in mid-flight … Sunset was in his eyes: a glory, he could not see; and her taut simple body, almost breastless … was an ecstasy in golden marble, and in her face the passionate ecstasy of a child” (320-1). Flight, marble, ecstasy: these signal an exercise of spirit that nothing said or done on the novel’s yacht can match. Flight will always enkindle Faulkner’s imagination, and it will usually involve—what is absent here—the mortal danger that attaches to transcendence.

  On the ground, as on the water, Mosquitoes rehearses its suffocating rituals. “They rolled smoothly, passing beneath spaced lights and around narrow corners, while Mrs Maurier talked steadily of her and Mr Talliaferro’s and Gordon’s souls” (MOS 270). To talk of one’s soul is, for Faulkner, to have no soul. Apart from the two moments identified earlier, Mosquitoes has no genuine interest in the soul. Nothing is more than skin deep here. The “profound” talk, saturated in self-consciousness, is especially skin deep. “You become conscious of thinking, and then you start right off to think in wor
ds. And first thing you know, you don’t have thoughts in your mind at all: you just have words for it” (445). Words appear as the ceaseless outpouring of open-mouthed beings, as the tiresome gesture—arousing and irritating—with which portentousness would pass itself off as spirit.

  Before taking on this book, Faulkner had been hesitant—he wasn’t sure he knew enough yet to manage its materials—but the problem was deeper than lack of knowledge. He loved New Orleans for its encouraging a free-living, free-drinking release of the spirit and the body. But New Orleans as a scene where pontificating artists and philosophers endlessly talked of work they never created: toward that city he felt contempt. Some writers—like Aldous Huxley, whose example served him here—make good use of contempt, creatively deliver a scene saturated in corrosive ironies. Not Faulkner. His great work to come would involve unthinking projection into the materials, would center on the ordeal of outraged spirit. The talkiness of words, their cheap exchangeability and the social/cultural jockeying that accompanied them, was outside the fictional territory he could imaginatively bring to life.

  Dorothy Parker once confided to Ben Wasson that Faulkner’s attempts at social repartee were awkward and embarrassing: “He should leave it to the likes of us to see how feather-brained we can be. My God, his wit is execrable. He’s too great a man for our kind of foolishness” (CNC 109). Did Faulkner glimpse that foolishness—not folly but foolishness—was outside his fictional range, when he characterized Mosquitoes to Liveright as “trashily smart”? If so, it would have been an unwelcome recognition, since the man whose Flags in the Dust had just been turned down was hardly regarded as a “great” man. Parker was speaking of the Faulkner she met in the early 1930s; in November 1927 he was not yet that man. Three masterpieces—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary—would appear in the next three years. Seen in the light of their brilliance, as well as the attention they had garnered, he might well have struck her as “great.” But that aura was beyond his wildest fantasies in late 1927. All he wanted to do was to get Flags published, to stay on his feet. The future could wait; his insurmountable trouble was the present.