Excerpt


William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist

by Daniel J. Singal

The following is an excerpt from William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, by Daniel J. Singal. Copyright 1997 The University of North Carolina Press. Do not duplicate or distribute without express permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.


From Chapter 7
The Making of a Modernist Identity: Light in August

Aside from his revision of Sanctuary toward the end of 1930, that year was to mark a relatively fallow period for Faulkner. Newly married, with a baby expected early in 1931, he spent most of his work time producing short stories for sale to popular magazines in order to meet growing family expenses. These efforts need not detain us. As Frederick Karl observes, Faulkner regarded this kind of writing as "strictly a business proposition" and took a highly "mechanical approach" to it. Though a few of the resulting stories were noteworthy from a literary standpoint, most simply served to pay the rent.

What did engage Faulkner during 1930--and also gave rise to much of the financial burden he now fell under--was his purchase of an antebellum home located just a few minutes from the town square in Oxford. Built in 1844, the old Shegog place could not properly be called a mansion but did partake of the pretensions of its time and place. A moderate-sized wood frame house, it sported four impressive columns in front and was set at the end of a classic cedar-lined drive. The house was decidedly more bourgeois than aristocratic in character--closer to the solid, comfortable Benbow home described in Flags in the Dust than the elegant plantation dwelling of the Sartorises. Still, Rowan Oak (a name derived from Frazer's The Golden Bough referring to an old Scottish charm for staving off witches) was just grand enough to put the community on notice that this eldest member of the rising generation of Falkners intended to carry on the clan's proud traditions. Faulkner was, of course, highly ambivalent about those traditions, but Rowan Oak was perfect in that regard as well. Decades of neglect had left it in extreme disrepair, from its rotting foundation beams and leaking roof to peeling paint, broken windows, and a total absence of plumbing and electricity. Faulkner did most of the work himself, allowing him to balance his new role as lord of the manor with that of journeyman carpenter, to be a country squire with dirty clothes and hands. Even after the house was restored, visitors would continue to remark on the contrast between its imposing facade and the often shabby appearance of its master.

That need for compensatory balance between conflicting selves was more evident still in the layout of the ground floor at Rowan Oak, which was divided by a spacious main hallway into two separate worlds. To the right as one entered was the world of the Victorian Faulkner and his traditionalist wife, consisting of a formal parlor and dining room that could have graced any respectable American home during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The wallpaper with its large floral print, the full-length draperies, the ornate, sculptured furniture, the baby grand piano, the long dining table where meals were served by a butler--all conspired to create an aura of decorum and taste. But on the other side of the hallway one found a very different ambience in the large room designated the "library" or "study." There, surrounded by books and various artifacts (including several pieces of primitive or abstract art, along with his mother's portrait in oils of the Old Colonel), in a setting that by all reports was usually cluttered and chaotic, the Modernist Faulkner would plunk himself down in a comfortable chair, take up a fountain pen, dig deeply into his subconscious, and pour out all he had dredged up onto paper. Just as his two personae dwelled side by side within the same mind, each appearing at different times and fulfilling different functions, so the two halves of Rowan Oak were to coexist, each part of the same structure but configuring vastly different styles of culture and being.

Sitting in that study, his Modernist self very much in command, Faulkner on August 17, 1931, took up a piece of paper and inscribed the title "Dark House" at the top. Though the exact meaning of the phrase was probably still unclear to him, it was indisputably true that large, decaying antebellum homes held a special resonance within his imagination, symbolizing not only the glory of the mythical Old South but also something hideous and hidden, a forbidden secret lurking just beyond reach in the region's past. A few days later, the title was suddenly changed, apparently as the result of Estelle's casual remark while they were sitting outdoors just before dinner about how "the light in August is different from any other time of year." Faulkner seems to have sensed immediately that the metaphor implicit in her comment was just the one he was searching for. In his text he would speak of that "lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come," marking not only the late summer twilight but also the precise time of year when the season of growth and life first gives way to the following seasons of death and dissolution. Counterbalancing imagery of light and darkness would pervade the new novel, supplying a perfect vehicle for expressing the dynamic polarities rapidly coming to the fore in his consciousness--polarities of culture (Victorian/Modernist), history (past/present), gender (male/female), experience (innocence/corruption), and, above all, race (black/white). Light in August would be about these warring tensions.


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