The Life of William Faulkner

This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962

Carl Rollyson

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813944418
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus ), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second and concluding volume of Carl Rollyson's ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts—a symptom of the South's faded fortunes—and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund. And so he turns to the classic temptation for financially struggling writers—Hollywood.

Thus begins roughly a decade of shuttling between his home and family in Mississippi—lifeblood of his art—and the backlots of the Golden Age film industry. Through Faulkner's Hollywood years, Rollyson introduces such personalities as Humphrey Bogart and Faulkner's long-time collaborator Howard Hawks, while telling the stories behind films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. At the same time, he chronicles with great insight Faulkner's rapidly crumbling though somehow resilient marriage and his numerous extramarital affairs--including his deeply felt, if ultimately doomed, relationship with Meta Carpenter. (In his grief over their breakup, Faulkner—a dipsomaniac capable of ferocious alcoholic binges—received third-degree burns when he passed out on a hotel-room radiator.)

Where most biographers and critics dismiss Faulkner's film work as at best a necessary evil, at worst a tragic waste of his peak creative years, Rollyson approaches this period as a valuable window on his artistry. He reveals a fascinating, previously unappreciated cross-pollination between Faulkner's film and literary work, elements from his fiction appearing in his screenplays and his film collaborations influencing his later novels—fundamentally changing the character of late-career works such as the Snopes trilogy.

Rollyson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the composition of Absalom, Absalom!, widely considered Faulkner's masterpiece, as well as the film adaptation he authored—unproduced and never published— Revolt in the Earth. He reveals how Faulkner wrestled with the legacy of the South—both its history and its dizzying racial contradictions—and turned it into powerful art in works such as Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust.

Volume 2 of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated "writer's writer" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon. In his famous Nobel speech, Faulkner said what inspired him was the human ability to prevail. In the end, this beautifully wrought life shows how Faulkner, the man and the artist, embodies this remarkable capacity to endure and prevail.

1

Faulkner’s Shadow

Pylon, 1935

I have a title for it which I like, by the way: ABSALOM, ABSALOM; the story is of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him.

—William Faulkner to Hal Smith, August 1934

If Absalom proves to be about the sins of the father, lines of descent, a society’s decline, and the burden of the Southern past, Pylon takes up the irrelevance of sin (not to mention fathers), lines of ascent, a society’s transformation, and a weightless future.

—John T. Matthews, William Faulkner: Seeing through the South

A Hanger-on with High Flyers

By 1935, in several short stories, film scripts, and novels, Faulkner had already connected the world of Yoknapatawpha to the high flyers of World War I and the barnstormers of the postwar period in the figure of young Bayard Sartoris, bereft of his place in traditional southern culture and willing to risk all in the test-piloting that results in his death. Young Bayard and his twin, John, belong to that reckless crew of aviators in “Death Drag,” “Honor,” and other short stories. They live in the moment, unsure of the future, even as they continue to engage in “mock heroic” actions.1 On what terms, if any, can the world of the gentlemanly ideal, still in the sway of the Falkner family and their community, prevail in the modern world of airports and air circuses? It is a question posed by Faulkner’s own actions. In New Orleans, in 1925, he accompanied Hamilton Basso, who was writing a feature story about “The Gates Flying Circus.” Basso recalled that Faulkner seemed to relish the frightening flights in a rickety Wright Whirlwind two-seater: “Nobody else in our crowd had gone looping-the-loop in a bucket seat and open cockpit over the Mississippi River.”2

In mid-February 1934, William Faulkner attended an air show at the newly dedicated Shushan Airport in New Orleans, named after Colonel A. L. Shushan, president of the Levee Board. Faulkner had flown there with his flight instructor, Vernon Omlie, and both received the royal treatment, including a big black Cadillac with a driver at their disposal. Later, when Faulkner showed Omlie the novel that resulted from their trip, the aghast flyer said: “But you are calling these people unpleasant, and you are attacking the people who set up the airport, the levee board and the rest, and they were so nice to us, putting the car at our disposal. Do you still want to do that?” Faulkner said, “Certainly.” Omlie’s wife later claimed that Faulkner saw Pylon as another potboiler like Sanctuary, “somewhat pornographic” and designed to make money.3 Like the flyers he wrote about with such great fascination, he did what he loved to do in a world that put a price on everything, and in which he had to figure out the price he could exact for his work. That did not mean, as he told the Omlies, that he would not try to suit himself as well.

Faulkner keenly understood that like the flyers financed by Shushan and other businessmen, he was implicated in the commerce of book publishing and film production. In subtle ways, the novelist fashioned an objective correlative for his own ambition and how he compromised it in his depiction of the airport and its creator. Colonel H. I. Feinman, a “fine man,” touts his project in terms reminiscent of the novelist’s aspirations. The airport is the expression of an “Undeviating Vision and Unflagging Effort,” an achievement “Raised Up and Created Out of the Waste Land at the Bottom of Lake Rambaud.” It is not too much to read an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land in this corporate announcement, or even to detect ironic echoes in the site of the lake-bottom airport of the name of that visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud, who regarded himself as a seer, who cultivated his own soul and reached for the unknown—to quote one of his famous letters. Like Feinman, Faulkner wrested his work out of the “limbo of imagination”—as would Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, establishing his kingdom, Sutpen’s Hundred, just as Faulkner would create his Yoknapatawpha and deem himself its sole owner and proprietor on the map inserted into the novel. Like Feinman, Faulkner believed in the originality of his vision and remained steadfast in the great effort required to write great fiction. But all his effort had to be disseminated in a marketplace that touted, as in Feinman’s case, the “Cost of a Million Dollars.” This novel may well be the “most devastatingly self-critical of Faulkner’s whole career.”4

This was the era of Governor Huey Long, whose administration promoted the construction of high-visibility projects that enhanced the profile of Louisiana and his own reputation as a politician who put people to work during the Depression while contributing to the progress that made modern life comfortable. Faulkner had little interest in Long. The governor’s life could not be the basis of a great novel.5 But the consequences of a regime that conjoined commerce and politics and cut corrupt deals, afterward staging celebrations purported to be for the public good, agitated an author who had become part of a Hollywood no less self-promoting and venal than Long’s Louisiana.

The Shushan layout may have reminded Faulkner of a movie set. The airport had two large hangars not so different from sound stages, and a tower with murals commemorating the history of flight in high-relief depictions of airplanes and their daring pilots. And like a Hollywood studio emblazoning its logo, the airport had Shushan’s name or his initials inserted in every available spot. In short, if you wanted to see the show, you had to put up with the advertising. And Faulkner was there for the show, indulging his keen interest in barnstorming pilots. He had organized his own local air shows, and flying was a Faulkner business, taken up by his brothers Murry, John, and Dean. The very idea of flight had captivated all of them since that day Faulkner had convinced them they could make their own air machine. That their dreams had crashed into a ditch did not dissuade the boys from pursuing the lift that flying always offered. And crashing, after all, was part of the excitement.

The Shushan show did not disappoint. Milo Burcham defied the rainy weather and demonstrated why he was the world champion at upside-down flying. The famous Michel Détroyat, on a calmer day, performed his air acrobatics, as did Clem Sohn, jumping from ten thousand feet with a flour sack he emptied to mark his descent. After some near-collisions and a forced landing, a pilot and parachute jumper plunged to their deaths in Lake Ponchartrain. In one case, the body could not be found; in another, no relatives could be located for the nomadic airman.6

Perhaps the anonymity of these deaths disturbed Faulkner and led to his writing Pylon. His own explanation is that Absalom, Absalom! had stalled, and he needed the relief that writing a different kind of novel provided.7 But it “seems significant that the novel Faulkner wrote ‘to get away from’ the high modernist Absalom, Absalom! is a book patterned to a degree after Hollywood criteria.”8 In fact, in July 1934, Howard Hawks suggested to the stalled novelist that he should write about flyers, and Faulkner told him about “This Kind of Courage,” the story that evidently presaged Pylon. Hawks said, “That sounds good,”9 and that seems to have been good enough for Faulkner. Pylon and Absalom, Absalom! are both about deracination and displacement. Like Thomas Sutpen, Pylon’s rootless flyers swoop down on land that has been converted into property, into the possession of one man, the not so fine Colonel Feinman.

With Pylon, Faulkner could dispense with Absalom, Absalom!’s genealogy of characters fraught with the intricacies of a narrative overwhelmed by the eruption of the past in the present. Faulkner’s flyers—Roger, Laverne, and Jack—have, for most of the novel, no past. Their lives seem the work of happenstance. Their mechanic, Jiggs, is an unreliable alcoholic who is nevertheless devoted to them, which is all they seem to require. The novel’s center of consciousness—always referred to as “the reporter”—is not even given a name. He is drawn to the aviators because they are so alive in the air. On the ground, their lives seem rootless and sordid. Roger and Jack share Laverne, who is married to Roger because he won the roll of the dice with Jack. Laverne is like the tough-talking women—Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday and “Feathers” in Rio Bravo—who populate Howard Hawks’s later films. She is also like Joan Crawford’s character Ann in Today We Live, the female fulcrum of male triangles in the terse tension of war and romance.

Laverne Shumann is not the nymph pursued in Faulkner’s early poetry. She is full-bodied—part of a life intensely lived, which means risking death, precisely what Dr. Martino urged upon Louise. Laverne is a woman possessed, the cynosure of male society, but also her own woman, dogged by a reporter who is a descendent of Keats’s frail knight, “alone and palely loitering”—in effect, a knight manqué.10 The war is mentioned only once in Pylon, when Jiggs buys “one of the pulp magazines of war stories in the air,” which will give Laverne and her male companions “something to do on the train” that takes them to the air shows in which they will duel in the air with their competitors. If this is not the world of gentleman flyers, it remains, nevertheless, a kind of chivalric endeavor involving sacrifice and heroes, however corrupted for popular entertainment and profit.

Faulkner’s treatment of the reedy reporter is original and yet probably based on Hermann Deutsch, a thin, tall journalist with a shambling gait whom Faulkner transformed into his shambolic, skeletal character. The two men first met in 1925 in New Orleans and were impressed with one another. Deutsch remembered Faulkner saying to him, “If somebody in the Yale Bowl was going to be shot, you’d be standing next to him.”11 It was a line Faulkner would elaborate on in Pylon, when the editor says as much to the reporter.

At the air show, the novelist spent a good deal of time in Deutsch’s company, watching the journalist carry around on his shoulders a little boy who belonged to one of the aviators. Out of this meager material, Faulkner conceived of the reporter who becomes increasingly involved in the lives of the flyers he comes almost to worship because they seem solely intent on their air missions. They are “hooked on speed.”12 They are adventurers and likened to “immigrants walking down the steerage gangplank of a ship.” They are refugees hazarding a trip into what was still then the new world of flight. They no longer have a secure place, a home to which they could return “even if it’s just only to hate the damn place good and comfortable for a day or two.”

It looks as though Faulkner patterned the besotted, drunken reporter on himself. Faulkner could become voluble when it came to talking about flying.13 When he turned up in New Orleans after the air show, he looked as if he had slept in the gutter. “Yes, ma’am, I have,” he assured writer Roark Bradford’s wife. Faulkner claimed to have become involved with the flyers, sleeping and fighting. It was a “disjointed, confused, nightmarish tale of having been offered a ride by a man and woman riding a motorcycle, or perhaps riding two motorcycles, with stops to visit bootleggers,” said Roark Bradford’s son, who also remembered that Faulkner never forsook his “elaborately polite and chivalrous” manners: “He was the only person over the age of twenty-one who was allowed to call my mother ‘ma’am.’”14 Faulkner had not eaten for several days. He certainly acted like the starved reporter when he devoured three eggs and bacon she made for him. He talked about two women and three men living together indiscriminately,15 which he compacted into the one woman and two flyers who become the reporter’s obsession. This was Faulkner as hanger-on in this world of high flyers. To Vernon Omlie’s wife, Phoebe, Faulkner was very much like the reticent reporter who goes along for the ride and puts himself at the service of the flyers. She said Faulkner had “no real desire . . . to be a precision flyer” or make flying a business. It became, instead, “a mental and emotional release”—as it does for the reporter who liberates himself from the grimy and gloomy environs of the newspaper office. Phoebe observed a “rather shy man who wanted to be left alone.” In a “pair of old coveralls” he would lose himself in a “group of mechanics, and help out by washing parts or doing what he would around the general aircraft operation rather than be out where people could see him and lionize him.”16 In short, Faulkner craved the anonymity he confers on his reporter.

The reporter appears like an allegorical figure, almost like a ghost in a medieval mystery play. In the popular imagination, especially as it was fed by movies like I Cover the Waterfront (1931), the journalist is usually self-sufficient and cynical, manipulating the woman he loves and willing to do whatever it takes to get the story, which often involves corruption and solving a crime or a criminal conspiracy. The journalist is like H. Joseph Miller (Ben Lyon) in I Cover the Waterfront or Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien) in The Front Page. Both journalists are humanized and redeemed by beautiful women, who bring out the reporters’ qualms about newspaper work. In fact, in Miller’s case, he is a budding novelist—a sure sign that morally he is better than most crass reporters.

Faulkner forgoes the Hollywood sin-and-redemption scenario with characters who never do follow a conventional moral compass and are not bound by any community’s standards of propriety. This air crew belongs nowhere and everywhere. It does not matter where they go so long as they can perform their show. By one definition, these are free spirits, not bound by any rules except those of the air races funded by capitalists like Colonel H. I. Feinman, Faulkner’s version of Colonel A. L. Shushan. To emphasize the impurity of Feinman’s power, he is identified as chairman of the Sewage Board. He is, in effect, the lord of a landfill, since the airport rests on reclaimed lake bottom. Ironically, the press treat Roger, Laverne, and Jack with fascination and scorn while spending not a moment inquiring into how the airport got built or what purpose the air race show fulfills in Feinman’s master plan that includes stamping the letter F all over his property.

Only the reporter believes the story is the air crew themselves, not just their antics in the air. He is fascinated with how they live apart from the society they entertain. They seem to find it enough to be with one another. They work together as one unit, although Jack has a temper he expresses by kicking Jiggs, and Roger—e...