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“The Company of Him Who Had Passed beyond Death and Returned”: Flags in the Dust
Despite Liveright’s rejection, Faulkner knew that Flags was the best novel he had yet written. A glance at its opening paragraph intimates why:
As usual old man Falls had brought John Sartoris into the room with him, had walked the three miles in from the country Poor Farm, fetching, like an odor, like the clean dusty smell of his faded overalls, the spirit of the dead man into that room where the dead man’s son sat and where the two of them, pauper and banker, would sit for a half an hour in the company of him who had passed beyond death and returned. (FD 543)
“As usual”: none of Faulkner’s earlier fiction had risked—or reaped the rewards of—the “usual.” From New Orleans Sketches through Mosquitoes, he had sought the unusual, the extraordinary. A certain desire to grandstand—“Pay attention to me!”—insinuates itself throughout that earlier work. It may not be too much to say that such work (poetry as well as prose) was damagingly invested in his need to demonstrate his difference. Flags opens instead on a familiar Southern town engaged in one of its identity-confirming rituals: rehearsing how the South lost the Civil War sixty years ago.
New, as well, is Faulkner’s willingness to begin with old folks. Soldiers’ Pay and Mosquitoes deal mainly with ardent and aggressive people younger than either of these old men, unspeakably wounded soldiers and the women they court, self-important artists and the theories they sport. Old man Falls carries into that room neither wound nor theory; he brings with him a past—and a ghost. Within a paragraph, Faulkner has found his way into his region’s abiding neurosis. Its present is overshadowed, quietly suffocating under a past that has not passed. The South that is incidental to Soldiers’ Pay and marginal to Mosquitoes is now center stage. Although Liveright seems not to have noticed it (he could find no unity in Flags), every vignette in the novel contributes to a diagnostic rendering of Faulkner’s South. Diagnostic, not adversarial: could Liveright have missed Flags’s unemphatic but sustained critique because he found nothing Mencken-like in it, nothing contemptuously dismissive?
Just a page further, old man Falls brings something else to this book: white Southern vernacular. Faulkner had used black vernacular (often heavily stylized) in both the New Orleans sketches and Soldiers’ Pay, and Flags goes on to delight more amply in black speech. “Delight” is the right verb, though a troublesome one. Delight in black vernacular fuels innumerable passages of white-authored Southern literature, testifying to racial affection cushioned on an unthinking conviction of white superiority. Little Southern white vernacular, however, had appeared in Faulkner’s earlier work (urban gangster and underclass idioms are a different matter). In making old man Falls speak, Faulkner began to tap what would become one of his greatest novelistic resources:
“They was times back in sixty three and fo’ when a feller could a bought a section of land and a couple of niggers with this yere bag of candy. Lots of times I mind, with ever’thing goin’ agin us like, and sugar and cawfee gone and food scace, eatin’ stole cawn when they was any to steal and ditch weeds ef they wa’nt; bivouackin’ at night in the rain, more’ n like.” (FD 730)
Did Faulkner recognize that Falls’s voice was worth a dozen Swinburnes? That the poetry he had been recycling from other sources was all around him—in a different form—in the spoken vernacular of his region? There are many keys that help explain the master that Faulkner was to become, but one is that—in the figure of Falls, and later of Suratt and the MacCallums in Flags—he irresistibly sounds the vernacular rhythms of his place. No need to borrow from Housman or Eliot or Aiken; no need to tend an unspeakable wound; no need to sound “trashily smart” or to mock others for doing so.
The ritual of remembering the Lost Cause entails further rituals. Falls has come to Old Bayard’s office to give him the pipe that belonged to Bayard’s larger-than-life father, Colonel Sartoris, the Civil War hero. It is utterly pertinent (my next chapter will expand on the pertinence) that Faulkner—who smoked a pipe most of his life—was here recycling a ritual of his own great-grandfather, Colonel W. C. Falkner, also a Civil War hero. In Flags, the bond across time stretches across class as well; “pauper and banker” come together in the piety of shared memories. Bayard makes other gifts to the older man, supplying him annually with chewing tobacco. Flags registers this ceremony in common with a further one—this time bonding not classes but races—as it rehearses the “Christmas gift” ritual that moneyed whites enact with impoverished black servants and workers. Such rituals are far from innocent, and Faulkner does not justify them. The point is that he now sees them, puts them into narrative. The South in Flags may be moribund, but its author supplies it with tempo, texture, credible social norms.
Such Civil War-descended norms are useless for the young men returning from the Great War. Falls and Old Bayard have nothing helpful to say to the young—they can barely even hear each other since both are nearly deaf. Both are turned involuntarily toward the greater dead one, Colonel John Sartoris, who entered with them in that opening paragraph and broods on them. This dead Sartoris—more potent than when alive—dominates Flags. The book opens under his aegis and closes there as well: “He stood on a stone pedestal … one leg slightly advanced and one hand resting lightly on the stone pylon beside him … his back to the world and his carven eyes gazing out across the valley where his railroad ran and the blue changeless hills beyond, and beyond that, the ramparts of infinity itself” (FD 870). The ramparts of infinity: there is no space in Flags his marble statue does not oversee. To repudiate what he stands for is to have no standing at all. Young Bayard must enter Flags clandestinely, “like a hobo … [without] sojer-clothes … lak a drummer er somethin’” (546).
The implicit drama that Liveright missed in Flags involves the perverse and futile motions of the young who cannot follow the ancestral standard. Faulkner orchestrates this drama by way of a pair of twinned characters: young Bayard and young Horace, both orphaned, returning from the Great War. Critics have claimed that Phil Stone sat for the portrait of Horace (Stone often said so himself), but Faulkner amply endows Horace with elements of his own malaise, including his noncombat status. Horace suffers from bookishness, idealism, loneliness, love-misery. He is a figure of innocence catapulted into a world of unwanted experience: “It’s having been younger once. Being dragged by time out of a certain day like a kitten from a tow sack, being thrust into another sack with shreds of the first one sticking to our claws” (FD 801). Although Flags cannot narrate that younger day—a failure The Sound and the Fury will powerfully redeem—the novel grants Horace a measure of the childhood-fueled amazement Faulkner never shed.
Sliding helplessly into the repellent sexual orbit of Belle Mitchell, Horace muses on the divorce she will engineer in order to marry him. He sees himself being set up to scratch a first husband’s scratchings. More, he recognizes with disgust why he is unable to flee:
a sort of gadfly urge after the petty, ignoble impulses which man has tried so vainly to conjure with words out of himself. Nature, perhaps, watching him as he tries to wean himself away from the rank and richly foul old mire that spawned him, biding her time and flouting that illusion of purifaction which he has foisted upon himself and calls his soul. (FD 800)
Impulse, words, nature, soul: this vocabulary appears in Mosquitoes, to be sure, but only in the argumentative voice of Fairchild or “the semitic man,” never with the brooding openness of Horace Benbow. He sees humans as made up of chemicals “clotting for no reason, breaking apart again for no reason still” (799), their being violently removed from an earlier and happier realm and hurtled into this savagely new one for which they are unprepared, the “shreds of the first one” still sticking to them. These motifs of amazement would flower unforgettably in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!
Young Bayard Sartoris, the careening force at the center of Flags, is the most compelling character Faulkner had so far invente
d. (Ben Wasson was quick to identify him as the fulcrum for the shortened version that would become Sartoris.) He brings with him a war trauma Faulkner somehow suffered without experiencing. Bayard has survived his twin brother’s being shot down by German fighter pilots. He is obsessed by the image of his brother John insouciantly mocking the death hurtling toward him in the air, even as the first Bayard Sartoris had gaily mocked his oncoming death fifty years earlier, shot down in the Civil War by a cook while raiding a Yankee commissary for anchovies. Young Bayard can neither match nor forget the glamour of his brother’s exit. Every act of postwar violence that he compulsively launches—on a horse, in a car, in a plane—reenacts the death-drive of his twin. A figure of unspeakable trauma, young Bayard cannot get free of that earlier death. Readers cannot take their eyes off him, nor can Horace’s sister, the serene Narcissa Benbow. She is drawn against her will into the orbit of his anguish. She “could see his bleak eyes and the fixed derision of his teeth, and suddenly she swayed forward in her chair and her head dropped between her prisoned arms and she wept with hopeless and dreadful hysteria” (FD 755).
What turmoil does his distress release in her—as though by contagion? Unable to narrate Bayard’s war experience coherently, Faulkner sidesteps it with hifalutin rhetoric: “a meteoric violence like that of fallen angels, beyond heaven or hell and partaking of both: doomed immortality and immortal doom” (FD 643). We are back to “a cocktail of words,” words thrown up as a screen against the real. The origin of Bayard’s war-oriented misery may remain beyond articulation, but its damaging effects are vivid. The drinking scenes that awkwardly launch Soldiers’ Pay and ritualistically punctuate Mosquitoes take on focus and power in Flags. Bayard’s binges with young men in town and with the MacCallums in the backcountry eloquently convey his futile search for sanctuary: “It’s my damned head. I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some” (658).
“It’s my damned head”: did Faulkner glimpse in this terse phrase the core of his dilemma as a writer? Did he recognize that Flags, for all its richness of regional description and analysis, did not find its way into the head—which is to say, into the heart? Faulkner himself had already learned to use alcohol to evade both head and heart. His heavy drinking would increase over time, becoming binge drinking. Usually, as he emerged from the booze, he would find that the drink had temporarily “ease[d] it off some.” Temporarily. I examine Faulkner’s alcoholism in some detail later, but for now the writerly problem of how to get into that “damned head” was before him. Despite the warmth with which Flags dilates on the routines and ritual of the South, it unmistakably emits an SOS of distress. Bayard and Horace—its orphaned young men in crisis—were suffering outside the reach of archaic cultural norms. Both were drowning in the now; neither could say why.
As Faulkner sought to revise Flags in late 1927, his mind turned repeatedly to Liveright’s reasons for turning it down. “If the book had plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions … 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.” Liveright had seen that Flags did not tell a story, but—Faulkner might now have pondered—had Liveright seen why it did not? Had Faulkner himself really seen why? In truth, if he looked at it hard, he had no story to tell. Perhaps what he had to tell, but had not yet learned how to tell it, was the breakdown of story. “It’s my damned head,” he had written in Flags. The unarticulated drama he had been unable to tell through Donald Mahon or Horace Benbow or Bayard Sartoris was locked unspeakably inside their heads. All three men were wounded, arrested, incapable of explaining themselves. None of them was a candidate for “story.” Mahon or Horace or Bayard eventually getting through their distress? Impossible. But what might be possible was to give voice and heft to the distress itself. Did he see that what had all along spurred his writing, but never gotten into the writing, was distress? To say the gap between was and is, the collapse of sanctioned expectations, to show how these roiled and derailed the “damned head”: he had not known this could be written. The outrage of being alive in the present moment and unprepared for what is coming at you—an explosion of moments beyond story altogether. The Sound and the Fury would not respond to Liveright’s warning, and it would probably never get published. But it would say distress as distress had not been said before.
The Sound and the Fury would locate distress where it originated—in childhood. Of his earlier work, only Elmer risked the pathos lodging there. The awkwardness of that unfinished text suggests Faulkner’s discomfort, his inability to go further in. Soldiers’ Pay and Mosquitoes both achieved fluency not least because, avoiding childhood, they protected his writerly immunity. Even Flags could access childhood only in the form of young Virgil Beard, an inexpressive child fixed somewhere between silent obsession and psychopathic rage. Young Virgil tortures insects and kills mockingbirds; he would soon flower into Sanctuary’s Popeye. He does not prepare us for a cluster of innocent children playing by a stream. Those children’s threatful future remains pastorally at bay, though continuously implicit in their words and gestures—intimated to us, unknown to them. Their fate lies compressed within a single radiant image—that of a little girl’s muddy drawers, seen from below by her hushed and hesitant brothers, while she remains high up in a pear tree, looking on death. Childhood as a drama of unpreparedness and exposure, of multiple times (the shaping past, the all-consuming present, the approaching future): as he had unknowingly lived it, as he luminously reconfigured it, later. His own childhood: that had been missing from the work all along.
CHILDHOOD
He was his parents’ first-born child, and—so he had always heard—his entry onto the scene was not easy. He was colicky for much of his first year (he would suffer from sleeping disorders off and on throughout his life), obscurely unhappy at being there at all. His mother would rock him for hours, the chair she sat in striking the floor and making their neighbors think the Falkners were chopping kindling all night long. He had come into the world on September 25, 1897, in the village of New Albany, Mississippi. His parents were almost as new to that setting as he was (they had moved in only a year earlier), and over the next five years the family would undergo two more displacements: to Ripley in 1898, and to Oxford in 1902. He didn’t know why these moves occurred; no one consulted him about them. He would later remember how, during those four years at Ripley, some people would pass to the other side of the street to avoid speaking to his family (F 24). He didn’t understand their motives then. Already, perhaps, he was registering what all infants experience, few later remember, and fewer yet go on to explore: that the past operates massively in the present, even if (especially if) you don’t yet know what that past contained.
He suffered from other displacements more wounding than changes of residence. Each of his brothers’ arrivals was hard on him. Murry Jr. (Jack) was born when he was less than two. Though free of colic, Jack was finicky about food and required incessant maternal care. The birth of John (Johncy), three years later, was even more difficult for him. Johncy was graceless enough to emerge on the scene only one day before his own fifth birthday, suddenly ousting him from attention. As though in revenge, he promptly contracted scarlet fever, and nearly died of it. To round it off, Dean’s birth five years later—probably the only sibling birth he consciously remembered—was the most trying of all. Born in August 1907, after a harrowing eight months during which both of the children’s grandmothers had sickened and died, Dean suffered from a severe case of cradle cap (an eczema on the crown of the infant’s head). His mother, still anguished over the recent loss of her own mother, frantically attended to her newborn’s needs. She had named him after her own mother (Lelia Dean Swift Butler) and could not bear to see him suffer.
Faulkner knew early on, without knowing why, that his parents were badly married. They were physically mismatched, but the troubling misfit was mental and emotional. Like other intractable troubles he would come to know, this one ha
d a concealed prehistory. Maud Butler Falkner was petite, with a sharply focused face and an even more focused mind. “Don’t Complain—Don’t Explain,” she had written in bright red letters above her kitchen stove. As Faulkner’s brother Jack said later, this was “her philosophy of life, and she passed it on in full measure to her children” (FOM 15-6). Such a message signaled to them the cardinal need for backbone, staying power. What it signaled about the giving and withholding of love was something else. Her mark on all her sons was deep and permanent. They were each to write her regularly when traveling, throughout their lives. If in Oxford, Faulkner would rarely miss a day of sharing coffee and conversation with her, up to the time of her death in 1960. The brothers all married, but the first woman in their lives seems to have remained their mother. She safeguarded this position of dominance by keeping at bay the wives her sons had taken—a distancing the sons apparently accepted without much question. That Faulkner was to compose his fiction on a frail spindle-legged writing desk she had given him—while sitting on a tall-backed chair she had likewise given him—is enormously telling. His mother was inseparable from the exercise of his imaginative life, which is not to say that he regarded her with anything but ambivalence. Mothers were to fare badly in his fiction, perhaps worse than fathers; his sympathies would always lie with their damaged offspring. It was she who first encouraged him to read widely in canonical Western literature—the Bible, the Greeks, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac, Dickens, Conrad. More, she steadfastly defended the novels he would produce over the years—including the notorious Sanctuary— whether or not she comprehended their purposes. (“Let him alone, Buddy,” she reprimanded her angered husband during Oxford’s outraged reception of Sanctuary, “he writes what he has to” [F2 1:687].)