The Life of William Faulkner, page 21
Parisian culture had a unity of effect that beguiled him. Young and old, for example, sailed finely crafted miniature boats. In the Luxembourg Gardens he watched an old man in a blue yachting cap launch his toy steam yacht to the accompaniment of advice from half a dozen bystanders: “Think of a country where an old man, if he wants to, can spend his whole time with toy ships, and no one to call him crazy or make fun of him! In America they laugh at him if he drives a car even if he does anything except play checkers and sleep in the courthouse yard.” The desire to play, a part of the aesthetic impulse, created a society that deeply appealed to this young novelist. His own art, in his own land, would always be a thing apart.
“I have come to think of the Luxembourg as my garden now,” Faulkner wrote his mother in early September. “I sit and write there, and walk around to watch the children, and the croquet games. I always carry a piece of bread to feed to the sparrows.” He was working rapidly, erecting twenty thousand words of Elmer by September 6. But he seemed even more excited by a two-thousand-word piece—“such a beautiful thing that I am about to bust”: “Luxembourg gardens and death,” with a “thin thread of plot, about a young woman.” He had worked on it for “two whole days and every word is perfect.” He considered it “poetry in prose form” and had not slept for two nights “thinking about it, comparing words, accepting and rejecting them, then changing them again” until it had become a “jewel.” Perhaps he had Helen Baird in mind. He met Helen and her mother in Paris, but he did not make a good impression on his beloved: “He was an oddball. Others traveled in autos, he on foot. He knew he was a genius.” Her mother called him a “screwball.”
So much seemed to coalesce in what would become Sanctuary six years later, begun in what was, in effect, his own garden sanctuary. The young woman became Temple Drake, and his words about himself, written to his Aunt Bama on September 10, reflected his growing appreciation of what literature meant to a proud man who, like Temple Drake, had yet to fully mature: “Did that ugly ratty-looking face, that mixture of childishness and unreliability and sublime vanity, imagine that? But I did. And the hand doesn’t hold blood to improve on it.”
Faulkner’s brooding on death arose out of the evidence of what war had wrought. He visited the Pantheon, “where the unknown soldier’s grave is. There is also in the Pantheon, on a blank panel of wall, a wreath to Guynemer, the aviator. . . . And so many young men on the streets, bitter and grey-faced, on crutches or with empty sleeves and scarred faces.” In Soldiers’ Pay, written in New Orleans, Faulkner had anticipated the fate of a returning war hero, Donald Mahon, who is, in effect, any soldier who loses his identity in war. He comes home as a kind of relic and wreck, one of the living dead, a ruin. Mahon’s scarred face and impending death is what Faulkner found in France in churches, “no matter how small,” with “long long lists of names.” France was a war museum: “Full of relics: crashed aeroplanes and guns and tanks and alarm klaxons.” In late September, on a walking tour, he saw rolls of wire, shell cases, and a rusting tank in a farmyard. No sign of trenches, but trees with their tops blasted off and “cemeteries everywhere.”
Faulkner continued to write, but what he should settle on seemed to elude him. Still, he seemed exhilarated by the possibilities that led him from the beginning draft of Mosquitoes to Elmer, and now to “a sort of fairy tale,” the “book of my youth” that would eventually become a novella, Mayday. The symbolist, allegorical, and realist impulses that would eventually culminate in his mature work remained in an unresolved tension and disambiguated in these separate writing projects.
A visit to the Moulin Rouge, “a vaudeville, where ladies come out clothed principally in lip stick,” actually was more art than a girlie show. The songs and dances were “set to real music,” including compositions by Rimsky-Korsakov and Sibelius. “It was beautiful,” Faulkner told his mother, and so much finer than plays—“Nasty things”—put on for Americans: “After having observed Americans in Europe I believe more than ever that sex with us has become a national disease. The way we get it into our politics and religion, where it does not belong any more than digestion belongs there. All our paintings, our novels, our music, is concerned with it, sort of leering and winking and rubbing hands on it. But Latin people keep it where it belongs, in a secondary place. Their painting and music and literature has nothing to do with sex. Far more healthy than our way.” Faulkner’s own sexual needs—not a subject for letters home—are opaque.
In “Divorce in Naples,” the innocent, virginal Carl does not realize he has become involved with a prostitute: “Maybe I got her into trouble.” Carl’s male lover, George, has to explain the facts of life and asks Carl if the woman showed Carl her “petite,” which is a prostitute’s license but also an allusion to her private parts. When George explains what a prostitute does, Carl, according to the story’s anonymous narrator, seems about to cry, but then George realizes that “he was just trying to not puke. So I knew what the trouble was, what had been worrying him. I remember the first time it come as a surprise to me. ‘Oh,’ I says, ‘the smell. It don’t mean nothing,’ I says; you don’t want to let that worry you. It ain’t that they smell bad,’ I says, ‘that’s just the Italian national air.’” This reference to a prostitute’s raunchy pudenda is just the kind of remark a seaman like George might make.
Stories like “Divorce in Naples” and “The Leg” explore the homoeroticism and coupling of men that Faulkner observed in New Orleans and elsewhere. He traveled comfortably in William Spratling’s company and, in Paris, consorted with another gay artist, William Odiorne. Did Faulkner’s visit to Oscar Wilde’s tomb acknowledge the artist’s affinity for all kinds of sexual experience? Seamen had easy commerce with women and men, no matter the circumstances, language, or sexual orientation, as the beginning of “Divorce in Naples” displays:
We were sitting at a table inside: Monckton and the bosun and Carl and George and me and the women, the three women of that abject glittering kind that seamen know or that know seamen. We were talking English and they were not talking at all. By that means they could speak constantly to us above and below the sound of our voices in a tongue older than recorded speech and time too. Older than the thirty-four days of sea time which we had but completed, anyway. Now and then they spoke to one another in Italian. The women in Italian, the men in English, as if language might be the sex difference, the functioning of the vocal cords the inner biding until the dark pairing time. The men in English, the women in Italian: a decorum as of two parallel streams separated by a levee for a little while.
The setting is France, but it might as well be New Orleans in the reference to “levee.” The passage evokes the image of an embankment between men and women that overflows in the “dark pairing time” of sexual intercourse, a union of otherwise two different but “parallel streams.” The story practically oozes in sexual emissions. Seamen? Semen?
Elmer and Other Erections
Faulkner seemed to work out his awakening desire to reconcile the erotic and the aesthetic in his portrait of Elmer, the artist:
Then he would rise, and in his cabin draw forth his new unstained box of paints. To finger lasciviously smooth dull silver tubes virgin yet at the same time pregnant, comfortably heavy to the palm—such an immaculate mating of bulk and weight that it were a shame to violate them, innocent clean brushes slender and bristled to all sizes and interesting chubby bottles of oil . . . Elmer hovered over them with a brooding maternity, taking up one at a time those fat portentous tubes in which was yet wombed his heart’s desire, the world itself—thick-bodied and female and at the same time phallic: hermaphroditic. He closed his eyes the better to savour its feel.7
Elmer’s tactile expectation of creation, the ejaculatory joining of genders that is both a defilement and a fulfillment, a commingling of opposites—smooth and rough, thin and thick—amounts to an expression of a Faulkner full of possibilities and the pent-up energy that stymied his marble faun and Pierrot, who cannot consummate their art or their sexual desires.8 Elmer is similarly thwarted when a saleswoman in an art supply shop tells him he will need “lots of white”: “What would this tube bear? A woman white and soft as the inside of a loaf of bread, heavy-limbed, of a dull inevitable calmness leaning her full breasts on a window-sill, brooding on far things while a lean Harlequin striped like a snake in a slim passionate immaturity plucked his insincere guitar, singing up into a sky larks had emptied, unheard?” Faulkner drew a picture of this kind of unresolved, inauthentic world in The Marionettes, and in the Prufrockian figure of Vision in Spring. Elmer emerges as their complement aboard a ship to Europe: “He slid the virgin pregnant cylinders each into its proper place, as they had been when he purchased the box, with an old-maidish precision putting the box away beneath his berth.” Elmer has all the equipment of the artist, but he cannot generate art. The world that Elmer wants to encompass in his art is so near and yet eludes him, as Estelle and the figures in Faulkner’s poems whirled away: “From the bridge he could see the waist of the vessel sweeping forward and upward to the bows, no longer clumsy but graceful as the unconfined body of a dancing girl.” The simile, comparing the graceful bodies of a boat and a dancing girl, reflects Elmer’s search for form, which is Faulkner’s, of course, as well, drawing men and women, as Elmer does, making them “conform to that vague shape somewhere back in his mind, trying to reconcile what is, with what might be.”9
Faulkner’s shipboard voyage, his traveling away from home, engendered in his portrait of Elmer a reckoning with what it meant to be an incipient artist outside his father’s hardware store, and outside what was considered normal male behavior:
He had already found that people, family, friends, and just people, were beginning to expect a certain propriety of conduct of him; that it was no longer permitted to stand before the windows of a hardware store and admire shining nickel joints and slim pipes at the end of which shower bath sprays bloomed like imperishable flowers; that before the drugstores he must feign interest in bars of soap or rubber bottles instead of in tall simple glass vases filled deliciously with red and green. . . . He would like to touch them, to stroke them as you might a dog. But he dare not. So he must pass along the street looking as empty as any other adolescent in the fifth grade, sneaking looks at things he once might have stopped and frankly admired.
Now, in Paris, he could stop and admire as much as he liked with no one to urge him on to more practical matters. And yet, what were Faulkner’s letters home but an effort to maintain that “propriety of conduct” even as he cultivated his dissent in a beard that could now hold water, as he told his mother, and in a running commentary on how, at so many points, Europe offered a liberating perspective on down-home habits. Seldom did a letter of his reach home without a drawing in it, a constant reminder of the artist in embryo. “I have him half done, and I have put him away temporarily to begin a new one,” Faulkner wrote home. “Elmer is quite a boy. He is tall and almost handsome and he wants to paint pictures. He gets everything a man could want—money, a European title, marries the girl he wants—and she gives away his paint box. So Elmer never gets to paint at all.” You can have it all, but when you have it all, you have no art, no recompense for what you cannot have. This little parable, which remained “half-done,” and which Faulkner never did complete, suggests he was in suspension, somewhere between the boy, the man, and the artist. When Vannye, the daughter of Aunt Bama’s elder sister, visited Paris, she laughed at Billy’s beard, because—he admitted to his mother—“she could see right through it to the little boy I used to be.”
Elmer is portrayed as developing from his innocent attachment to his sister, with whom he shares a bed, to his infatuation with a fourth-grade classmate to his coupling with Ethel, who spurns him for another financially secure suitor. Faulkner’s trauma over Estelle seems vaguely in the picture here, as does Elmer’s desire to return to Ethel as famous “Elmer Hodge the painter.” His “sexual development merges with his development as an artist.”10 But Elmer, like its eponymous hero, fails to achieve full growth because its author, still cultivating his beard, could not coalesce a narrative that fully integrated the psycho-sexual-aesthetic dynamic that he explored again in another story, “The Leg,” inspired, it seems, by twenty-five-mile-a-day walks through Bretagne, Rouen, Amiens, Artois, Cantigny, where American troops first entered the war.
Faulkner described “The Leg” as a “queer story about a case of reincarnation.” It is much more than that, exploring “a profound sense of guilt” and “moral shock that World War I evoked in those who naively believed in human enlightenment and progress.” Nothing in Faulkner’s previous writing prepares one for the uncanny power of a tale of two men, an American, David, and his British friend, George, who are punting on the Thames just before the war begins. Like a poet in the pastoral tradition, George quotes Milton’s Comus in a setting that is like a “dream of a prewar paradise,”11 interrupted when George nearly drowns in a lock and is rescued (pulled out on a fishhook) by Jotham Rust, the brother of George’s beloved, Everbe Corinthia. This prefiguring of death occurs less than a year before David loses his leg in the war and George is killed. David, delirious in hospital, urges George—reincarnated, so to speak—to make certain David’s leg is dead and properly buried. The leg, in other words, has a life of its own and is no mere body part but somehow represents to David an independent member liable to wreak havoc. What follows is a scene in which Jotham attacks David in hospital, claiming to a chaplain that David deserves death. David also learns that a screaming Everbe Corinthia has committed suicide, notwithstanding Jotham’s effort to keep her at home. And then the chaplain shows David a photograph, dated on the day David was in hospital talking to the reincarnated George:
I sat quite still in the blankets, looking at the photograph, because it was my own face that looked back at me. It had a quality that was not mine: a quality vicious and outrageous and unappalled, and beneath it was written in a bold sprawling hand like that of a child: “To Everbe Corinthia” followed by an unprintable phrase, yet it was my own face, and I sat holding the picture quietly in my hand while the candle flame stood high and steady above the wick and on the wall my huddled shadow held the motionless photograph. In slow and gradual diminishment of cold tears the candle appeared to sink, as though burying itself in its own grief.
What has happened? What could have happened? One explanation—an extrapolation of this passage—is that David “discovers that the leg has been reincarnated in another person, a physical likeness of himself,”12 a shadow self, but David does not recognize his pernicious visage. The unprintable phrase is almost surely something nasty and lewd, and the implication is that David seduced Everbe Corinthia. This is why her brother, George’s savior, has tried to kill David. In the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, George would be David’s better, redeemable self. In Faulkner’s fiction, George is David’s conscience, the part of himself that is not in the photograph, the part of himself that cries out: “I told him [George] to find it and kill it. . . . I told him to. I told him.” The “it” is clearly that other member, David’s penis, the projection of a libido that has a life of its own, or a leg that leads a man to do what he knows he must not do—in this case seducing his friend’s beloved and betraying his friend. David and George are brothers as closely bound to one another as Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon will become in Absalom, Absalom! David is as surely buried in his own grief as the candle that flames out and gutters. The wick, often a euphemism for penis, subsides as David reacts in horror at the consequences of his desire. “Rather than shaped by war,” David’s “identity has been torn apart by it, bright self from dark, head from leg.”13
Even in his prewar idyll with David, George jocularly refers to the Thames as “Thou mighty sewer of an empire!” Such allusions reflect the “coexistence of surface innocence with unseen diabolic forces that will betray the dreams of the naive and unleash the horrors of World War I.”14 Faulkner’s Freudian orientation, even if he had not read Freud then—or ever—is palpable and could have been absorbed from Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), a copy of which was in Faulkner’s library, or Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), which was not. Her novel exposes the return home of the shell-shocked, amnesiac veteran and the prewar paradise of home and family that the war, in fact, reveals to be an illusion. This is why the “structure of the narrative itself is torn between realism and a sort of hallucinatory surrealism.”15 We do not know how David’s leg was lost or even if he really did rape Everbe Corinthia. What matters is that he has lost control over himself and what the war has done to him.
Faulkner’s letters home reveal nothing of how deeply steeped he was in the war that had dislocated civilization before he set foot in England. By early October he had docked in London, arriving in the “usual fog,” a concoction of coal smoke and grease. He walked through streets “full of beggars, mostly young, able-bodied men who simply cannot get work,” selling boxes of penny matches, playing music, and drawing with colored chalk on the pavement for “a few coppers.” He hit all the highlights: “Westminster, the Tower, all those old coffee houses where Ben Jonson and Addison and Marlowe sat and talked, and Dickens’ Bloomsbury, and Hounslow Heath where they robbed the mail coaches, and Piccadilly, and St. Paul’s, and Trafalgar and Mayfair,” the fog notwithstanding. He was amazed at how much the English ate—five times a day, and “nothing under heaven is allowed to interfere with it.” He listed the full menu for his mother, beginning with a small pot of tea and toast brought by a servant while he was still in bed, then eggs and bacon and sausage and marmalade, butter and toast with a “huge pot of tea” in a coffee room, followed by a lunch of “beef or mutton and cabbage and boiled potatoes and ale” in a pub, and, at four, tea wagons rolling down train platforms with tea and muffins and scones. By seven, more “beef or mutton and cabbage and baked potatoes and ale.” By eleven or twelve in the evening, the English were still at it with “a smoked herring-and-cheeses sandwich and a tumbler of whiskey and water, or hot rum punch.” He did not stay in London long because it was so much more expensive than Paris. The deep-green peaceful countryside pleased him: “No wonder Joseph Conrad could write fine books here.” In spite of more complaints about the high cost of living, he bought a hand-woven Harris tweed that had “every possible color in it . . . [c]ut by the swellest West-End tailor—one of those places ‘By Appointment to H.M. The King, H.M. The King of Sweden, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales.’”
