Wednesday, May 11, 2005

The Agony and the Sweat

One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini. HarperCollins. $29.95

Not long before his death in 1962, William Faulkner spoke revealingly about his writing process to a group of cadets at West Point.

"I'm very disorderly," he said. "I never did make notes or set myself a stint of work. I write when the idea is hot, and the only rule I have is to stop while it's still hot -- never to write myself out -- to leave something to be anxious to get at tomorrow. Since I have no order, I know nothing about plots. The stories with me begin with an anecdote or a sentence or an expression, and I'll start from there and, sometimes I write the thing backwards -- I myself don't know exactly where any story is going."

It's a rare Faulkner reader who hasn't felt the same way; hell, so do his characters. Thomas Sutpen, the doomed patriarch at the heart of Absalom, Absalom!, thinks of himself as a figure in a Greek tragedy where “the events and occasions took place without chronology or sequence.” As Faulkner's latest biographer Jay Parini puts it, "Faulkner demands a readerly patience, a willingness to turn a blind eye to absurdities and periodic confusions, a tolerance for writing that occasionally fails to reach a minimal standard of clarity and cohesion."

His novels are, also, addictive, particularly the ones he wrote in his peak years of 1928 to 1942. People can’t stop suffering through them enough, because the payoff is always so great. They are densely-arranged Cubist structures that yield something new every time you look at them. Absalom amazes me every time I read it, and I read it at least once a year. (A by no means unusual habit, by the way. “I read it all the time, says the North Carolina writer Lee Smith. “I read it the way other people read the Bible.”)

First, there’s the enormous challenge of figuring out just what’s going on. Indeed, you could say this is something of a Faulkner theme, as Absalom is ultimately a novel about the elusiveness of truth, and how history has as much to do with imagination as fact. That is the deeper level of the book; the first thing you have to get through is what one thing has to do with another. The plot involves miscegenation and incest over the course of several generations; knowing the story of Sutpen means knowing the story of the bastard son he had with a black mistress in Jamaica, and that bastard son’s bastard son by an octoroon mistress, and then that by now light-skinned bastard son's marriage to a black woman, and their child and -- even more important -- what all this has to do with Sutpen’s legitimate children by his wife Ellen. Race also plays a huge role in Go Down, Moses, the story of the McCaslin family, whose genealogy is so bafflingly tangled up, including several characters with the same names, that you may find yourself mapping out your own family tree (or looking one up on-line.)

Then there are Faulkner’s narrators, who twitter away in stream of conscious monologues that defy human speech of any kind, and frequently go off on tangents -drilling through layers of magma not just to get to the point, but its hot burning core. There's Absalom’s Rosa Coldfield, her mind roaming through decades of disaster and disappointment, her "voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand." Even when she shuts up she's still talking, carrying on some conversation in her head that (like all Faulkner’s characters) freely jumps from one distant episode to another, now and then coughing up some phrase that positively no old woman in Mississippi would have dreamed of saying during the novel's 1918 time frame. ("I became all polymath love's androgynous advocate.") Faulkner digs into his characters, giving their puny inexhaustible voices a poetic intensity they didn't know they had. As Parini puts it, Faulkner "reaches past language into a zone of consciousness where articulateness necessarily crumbles."

From his first novel, Flags in the Dust (published as Sartoris), Faulkner had mapped out his territory: Oxford, Mississippi, his own "postage stamp of native soil," would become Jefferson, county seat of Yoknapatawpha, a typical Southern backwater with a solidified class structure of ruthless land-owners, scheming white trash and resilient blacks. This and his next two books gained little notice; with his fourth, The Sound and the Fury, in 1928, he finally found the key to the highway. In this story of the implosion of a decadent Southern family, Faulkner rewrote the laws of conventional narrative from the get-go, handing off the opening section of a four-part narrative to a mentally retarded adult who can't distinguish between past and present. It cracked the modern American novel wide open, and it was only the beginning.

It was a classic case of right place, right time, perfect writer. Oxford could not have been further removed from the modernist fervor that was sweeping the arts, with Picasso in painting, and Joyce, Woolf, Pound and Eliot in literature, but its native son -- a local oddball, drunkard, and compulsive liar -- had soaked them all up in Paris during World War I, and brought them all back home.

Faulkner would never have enough to say about Yoknapatawpha, or find ever more complex and demanding ways to say it. In his corner of the world he had found a place that perfectly suited both his broad humor, and his sense of the meanness of human life. As I Lay Dying, famously written over the course of six weeks while Faulkner served as night watchman at a power plant, is an epic tragedy in 200 pages where the ten-mile funeral trip of a poor white family becomes a grotesque parade of the futility of existence.

Yoknatawpha was also a microcosm of a country where racism had long since seeped under the skin. The theme reached a crescendo in Absalom, where a poor white boy named Thomas Sutpen sets out to avenge a youthful insult from a black servant by establishing a white dynasty, and only ensures his own destruction in the end.

Faulkner’s glorious winning streak may have been comparable only to Herman Melville in his Moby Dick years, but the public couldn't have cared less; his sales were so spotty that he had to supplement his income by doing Hollywood hack work, and life was further stymied by the usual obstacles writers throw in their paths: a bad marriage, joyous but ultimately frustrating affairs, mountains of debt and oceans of booze. ("I consider drinking a normal instinct, not a hobby," he said. "A normal and healthy instinct.")

All of Faulkner's books would be out of print by 1944; it would take years of rediscovery, and a Nobel Prize, to redress the balance. As he took the podium at Stockholm, Faulkner spoke of his career as "a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit." The spirit had largely vanished by then; there were more novels and prizes to come, but by his own admission the "one matchless time" was over. No matter; he had become a sacred cow. Still is.

At some level, Parini's biography is a functional piece of work about a great writer with a readymade book-buying audience -- the latest barnacle of conventional admiration to attach itself to the weatherbeaten Faulkner hull. He approaches the great man with fear and trembling, and often seems to be interested in little more than turning out the a harmless, generic portrait that any forty scholars could have pulled off just as competently. His writing is stiff, and the critical approach to the individual books is a Velveeta blend of Parini's timid opinion along with what everyone else thinks.

This is not unhelpful, as the critical opinions Parini so dutifully collates show just how interesting Faulkner has remained through the forty-plus years since his death, and how certain of his novels -- particyicularly Go Down, Moses -- are still being radically reinterpreted in ways that throw fresh light on their meaning.

Parini is also very good in the beginning at giving the background of Faulkner's life, notably pointing out that Faulkner's great-grandfather may have had a child by a slave. He also makes an interesting connection between Faulkner the would-be war hero, who was full of great tales of derring-do that never occurred, and Faulkner the writer: "He would often write about figures who pretend to be something they are not, who busily create fictions they must attempt to live by." Parini also finds a great deal of mythic invention in other aspects of Faulkner's life, and he chronicles the drinking that went along with it, which frequently led to hospital treatment, riding accidents and no doubt hastened his death at the age of 64.

Faulkner said that like his contemporary Thomas Wolfe, he was trying to say it all.

"I am trying to go a step further," he said. "This I think accounts for what people call the obscurity, the involved formless sentence, between one cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know is to keep trying in a new way."