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 the Introduction

All his life Faulkner would struggle to reconcile these two divergent approaches to selfhood--the Victorian urge toward unity and stability he had inherited as a child of the southern rural gentry, and the Modernist drive for multiplicity and change that he absorbed very early in his career as a self-identifying member of the international artistic avant-garde. Indeed, by the time he reached maturity, both had become so deeply embedded in his being that neither could effectively be suppressed or jettisoned. The tactic he ultimately arrived at for coping with this dilemma, most likely without being consciously aware that he was employing it, was that of "compartmentalization," in which, as Roy F. Baumeister explains, "one confines the potentially conflicting components to separate spheres of one's life." Put simply, there would be two William Faulkners.

In fact, self-division of this sort is not unusual among literary artists, existing as such individuals do partly in reality and partly within their own imagination. "I think that a writer is a perfect case of split personality," Faulkner once remarked, doubtless drawing on his own experience. "He is one thing when he is a writer and he is something else while he is a denizen of the world." The syndrome can reach the point, clinicians tell us, where it closely mimics schizophrenia, with the writer cultivating a private "inner self" that, like the true schizophrenic's, is kept rigorously hidden from public view except in his or her work. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats, to take one instance, maintained what he called his "objective self," embodying the codes and rituals of his daily existence, and a subjective "antithetical self" that found expression in his inner consciousness and art. In some cases the two selves can become so distinct that they receive different names. One thinks of Charles Dodgson, the meek, retiring mathematician who could indulge his extraordinary gift for fantasy only through adopting the persona and pen name of Lewis Carroll, or Samuel L. Clemens, a thoroughly divided man who simultaneously installed himself as a member of the bourgeois establishment while pillorying its pretensions through the frontier perspective of his alter ego, Mark Twain. Awkward though such devices might be on occasion, the writers in question have been unable to function without them.

William Faulkner may not have adopted a separate name for his literary self, but he was profoundly self-divided, as those who knew him well reported again and again. To understand him, his wife once insisted, one had to begin with the fact that he was "so definitely dual," to the point where there were "two Bills." In his youth, he experimented with an extensive repertoire of trial identities, ranging from the battle-scarred First World War aviator to the bona fide southern aristocrat to the bohemian writer and small-town derelict. By the late 1920s, however, a pattern of two central selves--old-fashioned country gentleman and contemporary writer--became reasonably well established. On occasion these two Faulkners would appear in startling juxtaposition. "You might see him riding a horse some day, all liveried up as they say--had on the dress like a colonel," notes an old friend. "Then he'd come out . . . with long whiskers and look like a hippie." More typically, though, each self retained a favored realm where it held sway. The extensive divide between his dual incarnations even came to astonish Faulkner himself. "I wonder," he wrote a close acquaintance in the early 1950s, "if you have ever had that thought about the work and the country man whom you know as Bill Faulkner--what little connection there seems to be between them."

In the words of Michel Gresset, the Modernist Faulkner, with his "malleable or bending self," was "formed through the act of writing and through nothing else." He was not often sighted in normal life, though he did surface periodically in places like New York, Paris, and Hollywood in the company of congenial friends (in New York his favorites included the futurist architect Buckminster Fuller and the avant-garde puppeteers Jim and Cora Baird). Rather, this Faulkner existed primarily within the isolated confines of his work space. "Withdrawing into a small room or study (the one at Rowan Oak would be deliberately plain, almost bare, recalling nothing so much as a monk's cell), taking the symbolic doorknob with him, he entered a world completely his own," David Minter tells us. There he was free to summon up the most lurid and perilous materials from his unconscious, exploring territory that his Modernist self sought to make its own. Often he would resort to a trancelike state to sustain this self, writing at a "white hot" pace and consuming a fair quantity of alcohol as he worked (though rarely allowing himself to become actually inebriated while writing). Even though his ostensible subject matter remained the South, this was primarily a cosmopolitan William Faulkner whose first loyalty went to his reading audience of all times and places.

The other Faulkner was the one encountered in Oxford, whose actions remained based on nineteenth-century values and who increasingly made his peace with the traditions of his native town. This Faulkner would find it necessary to buy and restore a large antebellum home, as well as a working plantation, take ritual walks to the town square dressed like a country squire, and display a fondness, as one neighbor put it, "for tweeds, pipes, and riding to the hounds." Perhaps most striking is the way the author of Sanctuary, who dealt more explicitly with sexuality than almost any other American writer of his day, maintained a high standard of Victorian prudery in his everyday public behavior. Repeatedly we are told by those who knew him in Oxford of how Faulkner would take offense at profane language and walk away at the first sign of off-color humor (though he would delight in telling "gamy" tales while in Hollywood and readily employed obscenities in his professional correspondence). "If someone started telling dirty stories, he was gone," a close friend and hunting companion notes. "He would leave and he wouldn't come back until you got through with the story." Nor would he discuss literary topics with his fellow townspeople under any condition, going so far as to refuse to allow the person who helped him wrap and mail his manuscripts to see their titles, and to respond with stony silence when his personal physician made the error of inquiring about a book he happened to find Faulkner reading. Likewise, when the wife of his old friend and mentor, Phil Stone, tried to engage him in conversation about an author she knew he admired, Faulkner, she reports, "did not just fail to reply; his silence was like a mallet on my head."


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